BioHealth Innovation, Inc. (BHI), a regional private-public partnership focusing on commercializing market-relevant biohealth innovations and increasing access to early-stage funding in Central Maryland, announced today that Reg Seeto, M.D., has been appointed to the BHI Board of Directors. Dr. Seeto currently serves as Vice President, Head of Partnering & Strategy at MedImmune, the global biologics research and development arm of AstraZeneca.
“It is a pleasure to welcome Reg to the BHI Board of Directors,” said Doug Liu, Chair, BHI Board of Directors, and Senior Vice President of Global Operations for Qiagen. “Reg’s background in business development and partnering strategy will be an important asset to our Board as we give counsel to BHI in its fostering of startups in Central Maryland. We look forward to his contributions to this Board, to the BHI organization, and to the biohealth startup community.”
Dr. Seeto rejoined the MedImmune Leadership Team in 2013 to lead the Partnering and Strategy Group after having spent a year as an executive abroad for AstraZeneca. He is responsible for MedImmune’s Business Development and Strategy teams, which deliver external partnership strategy for the organization.
Northrop Grumman Corporation (NYSE: NOC) has joined DreamIt Health Baltimore, a collaborative startup business accelerator program with the goal of identifying, validating and developing innovative solutions to healthcare challenges.
Northrop Grumman joins The Johns Hopkins University and BioHealth Innovation Inc. in the Baltimore-based accelerator, which was launched in September by DreamIt Ventures, a seed-stage accelerator based out of Philadelphia.
Startups selected for the four-month program receive $50,000 in seed funding; access to potential beta customers, pilot partners, data and systems; accounting and legal support; and expert guidance and mentoring from the accelerator and its partners.
From Sept. 15-25, Montgomery County executive Ike Leggett led a trip for four cities in China: Shanghai, Xi’an, Benxi, and the Gu’an County right outside of Beijing. The trip included over 80 business, education, and government leaders from Montgomery County and the DC metropolitan area including Montgomery County Public Schools (MCPS) superintendent Joshua Starr, county council member Hans Riemer, and Michael Goldman of the Washington Metro Area Transit Authority (WMATA).
This marked the first trade trip to china in five years by the county Executive’s office – the last one was in 2008.
The purpose of this mission was to encourage Chinese investors to consider Montgomery County as an attractive location for their investments, open doors for MoCo businesses there, as well as establish a “Sister City” relationship with the city of Xi’an, said a press release put out by the Montgomery County Office of Public Information.
SAVE THE DATE: DreamIt Health Baltimore 2014 Kickoff Weekend: January 17th and 18th, 2014 Baltimore, MD
DreamIt Health Baltimore – powered by The Johns Hopkins University, BioHealth Innovation, and Northrop Grumman – is ramping up for the Winter 2014 accelerator class in Baltimore, MD and we want to make sure the kickoff events are on your calendar. More information below.
DreamIt Health Baltimore Kickoff Reception: January 17, 2013 On the evening of Friday, January 17th, 2014 DreamIt Ventures and our partners are hosting a kickoff party to meet the DreamIt Health Baltimore 2014 companies and other members of the Baltimore entrepreneurial community. Location is TBD and the event will begin around 5:30/6:00pm eastern time. We will be sending formal invitations to the event in the near future but wanted to get this on your calendar now. Please ink us in!
The kickoff reception will include light snacks and beverages, in addition to networking and your first opportunity to meet the DreamIt Health Baltimore 2014 companies.
Sponsored by:
Kickoff Weekend Working Session: Saturday, January 18, 2014 – 9:00am – 5:00pm (INVITE ONLY) We are in the process of identifying potential mentors for the companies as well as pairing them up with their law firm & accounting firm partners. Members of this community should please save the date for our working session that Saturday with the companies. We’ll send out a detailed RSVP for the event soon.
If you have any questions about either of these events or the DreamIt Health Baltimore program please contact Dana Rygwelski (dana@dreamitventures.com).
Startups selected for the DreamIt Health Baltimore accelerator program will get $50,000 in seed funding and access to industry heavyweights like Northrop Grumman Corp.
The defense contractor has signed on as a partner for the new health IT accelerator program, where 10 startups will be selected for the program. The first program runs Jan. 17 through May 9.
On Saturday November 16, participants of the first ever Maryland Leaders on Fast Track (LOFT) symposium gathered at Johns Hopkins University in Rockville to explore STEM careers. The event, hosted by MdBio Foundation and Hispanic Heritage Foundation, drew over 150 participants from Maryland, Virginia, and D.C.
The symposium brought together a diverse student body from local high schools and colleges; over 90 percent of students were minorities and more than half were female. The event also attracted numerous community leaders, including Congressman John Delaney, Congressman Chris Van Hollen, Montgomery County Council President Nancy Navarro, and Montgomery County Executive, Ike Leggett who was awarded the ‘Maryland STEM Education Leader Award’ at the event.
Emergent BioSolutions wants to exercise an option to buy 8 acres next to its East Baltimore manufacturing facility for an expansion that eventually could add up to 100 jobs, a company official said.
The Rockville-based biotechnology company bought its facility on East Lombard Street for $7.85 million in 2009, and has invested $50 million there since, Chief Financial Officer Bob Kramer said.
The City Council is slated to vote Wednesday on the sale of the city-owned parcel next to the facility near Johns Hopkins Bayview Medical Center.
For research universities to produce the ideas and talent the United States needs in order to lead in the 21st century, they “must make a steady and persistent movement to adapt to the times,” according to William (Brit) Kirwan, chancellor of the University System of Maryland (USM).
Kirwan spoke on the future of research universities on Wednesday, Dec. 11, at the University of Delaware. The talk, presented to a group of UD faculty and administrators, was designed to help set the scene and percolate new ideas as UD considers the next phase of its Path to Prominence strategic plan, a process that will begin in the new year.
GSK announced a $1 million dollar prize for innovation in the emerging area of bioelectronics research. This prize will be awarded to the scientists who are first able to solve the challenge of creating a miniaturised, fully implantable device that can read, write and block the body’s electrical signals to treat disease and it is hoped that after finding a solution to this challenge will open and accelerate significant avenues of research in this field.
The scientific challenge was developed and agreed by a group of approximately 150 leading scientists from around the world, brought together by GSK’S Bioelectronics R&D unit at a summit this week in New York. Collectively, summit attendees agreed that if they create an implantable wireless device that can record, stimulate and block neural signals to a single organ, it will be a critical factor enabling the onward development of bioelectronic medicines as a future therapeutic reality.
AstraZeneca, a global and innovation-driven biopharmaceutical business, has signed an agreement to acquire the entirety of Bristol-Myers Squibb’s interests in the companies’ diabetes alliance for an initial consideration of $2.7 billion on completion and up to $1.4 billion in regulatory, launch and sales-related payments. AstraZeneca has also agreed to pay various sales-related royalty payments up until 2025. In addition, AstraZeneca may make payments up to $225 million when certain assets are subsequently transferred.
Upon completion of the transaction, AstraZeneca will own intellectual property and global rights for the development, manufacture and commercialisation of the diabetes business, which includes Onglyza (saxagliptin), Kombiglyze XR (saxagliptin and metformin HCl extended release), Komboglyze (saxagliptin and metformin HCl), dapagliflozin (marketed as Forxiga outside the US), Byetta (exenatide), Bydureon (exenatide extended-release for injectable suspension), metreleptin and Symlin (pramlintide acetate).
MedImmune, the global biologics research and development arm of AstraZeneca, is pleased to announce its participation in the Brazilian government program, Science Without Borders.
Thirty Brazilian post-doctoral fellows will work at MedImmune’s three sites in Gaithersburg, Maryland, Mountain View, California and Cambridge, UK for a period of two years. The areas of research will include oncology, respiratory, inflammation and autoimmune diseases (RIA), cardiovascular and metabolic diseases (CVMD), infectious diseases, translational science, antibody discovery and protein engineering, and biopharmaceutical development.
Please note that most links to RFAs, PAs, and Guide Notices will take you to the NIH Web site. RFPs will take you to FedBizOpps. Links to RFPs will not work past their proposal receipt date. Archived versions of RFPs posted on FedBizOpps can be found on the FedBizOpps site using the FedBizOpps search function. Under “Document to Search,” select Archived Documents.
Many medical scientists feel most comfortable at the laboratory bench, developing hypotheses, testing ideas, and running experiments. The US National Institutes of Health (NIH), too, almost exclusively funds this type of hypothesis-driven basic research.
However, bringing a drug, diagnostic tool, or medical device to market requires a lot more than basic research. The problem, scientists say, is that federal funding runs out long before a potential product is ready for investors. “If you’ve made a discovery with NIH grant money and you want to run some studies in a mouse model, those can be expensive, and it’s not the type of study that NIH reviewers typically like. There’s this gap in the ability to get money”, says Paul DiCorleto, director of Cleveland Clinic’s Lerner Research Institute.
Combined capabilities provide scientists with access to new and existing immortalized cell lines for use in broad research applications and clinical markets.
ATCC, the premier global biological materials resource and standards organization, and Evercyte GmbH, a proven developer of immortalized human cells, have entered into a strategic partnership to develop and distribute immortalized cell lines that retain key performance characteristics of primary cells. Immortalized primary cell lines enable scientists to have a sufficient supply of physiologically relevant cells for extended studies in biological, medical, pharmaceutical, cosmetic, and toxicological research.
Johns Hopkins University has the sixth-most driven student body in the world, according to data compiled by London-based startup ViewsOnYou.
The website uses three components to match people with a company or employer — energy, interpersonal and intelligence. There are more than 20 metrics that fall into those components, one of which is an individual’s drive.
The National Institutes of Health is releasing funding opportunities to build a new arsenal of tools and technologies for unlocking the mysteries of the brain. The NIH action is in support of President Obama’s Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies (BRAIN) Initiative.
The six opportunities announced today were developed in response to high priority areas(PDF – 536KB) identified by the NIH Advisory Committee to the Director’s BRAIN Working Group in September 2013. Awards are expected to be announced in September 2014 and will constitute NIH’s initial investment of $40 million in the initiative.
The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation just got a physician, big university administrator, and one of the world’s most respected drug developers rolled into one as its new CEO.
Susan Desmond-Hellmann, the chancellor of UC San Francisco since 2009 and the former president of product development at Genentech, has been hired as the new CEO of the Gates Foundation, according to a statement from the foundation. She will start on May 1. UCSF said Sam Hawgood, the dean of the school of medicine, will replace Desmond-Hellmann as interim chancellor.
It’s hard to believe that nearly two years after it picked its inaugural class of entrepreneurs to respond to trends in healthcare. Now the health IT accelerator in New York Blueprint Health is gearing up for class number five.
Looking back on its first graduates, Dr. Brad Weinberg, who co-founded the program with Mathew Farkash, noted that seven of the original nine companies are still in business. Five are generating revenue. Looking at its alumni of 39 companies with which it’s invested, 36 of them are still in operation and 80 percent are turning a profit — a record he would challenge other healthcare accelerators to beat.
This year, conversations about creativity and innovation have been happening all over the world. And while there’s still a long way to go, we’re excited to see just how many schools and communities are embracing the importance of letting a child’s imagination run wild.
A fantastic example of this is when five-year-old Miles Scott became Batkid in San Francisco-turned-Gotham City this November.
When personal genomics and biotech firm 23andMe was founded in Mountain View, Calif., in 2006, the hype over the genetic tests it offered directly to consumers was immediate and irresistible to many. The company promised that for a nominal fee, it could scan your saliva sample and tell you — based on your genetics — everything from who your ancestors were to what diseases you may be at risk of developing many years down the road. 23andMe raised more than $100 million in capital from such big-name investors as Google and Genentech. Today, the company’s website boasts having close to 500,000 “genotyped consumers.”
So it was a surprise to some observers when, on November 22, the U.S. Food & Drug Administration (FDA) sent a strongly worded letter to 23andMe CEO Anne Wojcicki demanding that the company stop marketing its test, called Personal Genome Service (PGS), until it secures authorization from the agency. The FDA contends that PGS is a medical device being pitched for the diagnosis and prevention of disease, and therefore it must obtain approval under federal law.
The three months of intense focus. The crafting of the perfect pitch. The big presentation on demo day, followed by press mentions and meetings with investors.
And…then what? What comes after the accelerator?
For the entrepreneurs of Rock Health’s Boston Class, which wrapped up in August of 2012, there have been four follow-on fundings, some pilot tests, a pivot and a few long quiet periods. I checked in with the entrepreneurs just over a year after they completed to program to see how they’re all doing now.
People should stop wasting their money on dietary supplements, some physicians said today, in response to three large new studies that showed most multivitamin supplements are ineffective at reducing the risk of disease, and may even cause harm.
The new studies, published today (Dec. 16) in the journal Annals of Internal Medicine —including two new clinical trials and one large review of 27 past clinical trials conducted by the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force — found no evidence that taking daily multivitamin and mineral supplements prevents or slows down the progress of cognitive decline or chronic diseases such as heart diseases or cancer.
BioHealth Innovation (BHI) is a regionally-oriented, private-public partnership functioning as an innovation intermediary focused on commercializing market-relevant biohealth innovations and increasing access to early-stage funding in Maryland.
The information contained in this website and newsletters is for general information purposes only. The information is provided by BioHealth Innovation via its newsletters, but not written or endorsed in any way by BioHealth Innovation unless otherwise noted. While we endeavor to keep the information up to date and correct, we make no representations or warranties of any kind, express or implied, about the completeness, accuracy, reliability, suitability or availability with respect to the website or the information, products, services, or related graphics contained on the website for any purpose. Any reliance you place on such information is therefore strictly at your own risk.
MedImmune announced on Wednesday a $6.5 million research partnership with Johns Hopkins University, marking the second academic collaboration inked by the Gaithersburg biotech in recent months.
The agreement, which spans five years, will center on projects in oncology, infectious disease, antibody discovery and protein engineering, as well as respiration, inflammation and autoimmunity.
Rockville-based biodefense company Emergent BioSolutions, taking steps to move deeper into the commercial drugmaking world, is paying $222 million to buy Cangene Corp., a Canadian firm, according to the Washington Post.
Emergent emerged as a key biodefense company following the Sept. 11 attacks, when it sold Anthrax vaccines to the U.S. government.
Northrop Grumman Corporation (NYSE: NOC) has joined DreamIt Health Baltimore, a collaborative startup business accelerator program with the goal of identifying, validating and developing innovative solutions to healthcare challenges.
Northrop Grumman joins The Johns Hopkins University and BioHealth Innovation Inc. in the Baltimore-based accelerator, which was launched in September by DreamIt Ventures, a seed-stage accelerator based out of Philadelphia.
Startups selected for the four-month program receive $50,000 in seed funding; access to potential beta customers, pilot partners, data and systems; accounting and legal support; and expert guidance and mentoring from the accelerator and its partners.
BD Diagnostics, a segment of BD (Becton, Dickinson and Company), a leading global medical technology company, today introduced two new erythrocyte sedimentation rate (ESR) instruments in Europe that standardise analysis for more accurate, timely results and an efficient workflow in comparison to a manual Westergren method. This next generation of BD ESR instruments results in improved patient care in the laboratory or point of care setting.
Erythrocyte sedimentation is a commonly used hematology test to measure inflammation and the presence and severity of disease. “Improved automation and efficiency are key to carrying out analytical tests in a busy laboratory. More and more tests are being conducted each year and reduced healthcare spending puts pressure on laboratory resources,” comments Stephen Church, European Medical Affairs, BD Diagnostics -Preanalytical Systems.
The University of Maryland (UM) BioPark announced today that the JS Yoon Memorial Cancer Research Institute, a basic research organization looking at the fundamental genetic and epigenetic basis of cancer, has expanded its space within the Biotechnology Innovation Center at the BioPark. The Institute, which moved into the Park in mid-2013, is housing six employees at the BioPark who are charged with performing basic cancer research designed to lead to therapeutic and diagnostic solutions addressing a variety of cancer types.
“What sets us apart from other cancer-focused entities is that we seek to elucidate the molecular basis of cancer and to use this knowledge to develop therapies and diagnostic tests, rather than the current method which is the other way around,” said Ji Eun Lee, Managing Director, JS Yoon Memorial Cancer Research Institute. “We’re thrilled to be conducting our research at the BioPark, which offers excellent proximity to the University of Maryland School of Medicine (UM SOM), Johns Hopkins, the National Cancer Institute, and the National Institutes of Health. It’s also a huge benefit to have access to the top-rate resources and core facilities available through the UM SOM as we conduct our research.”
GlaxoSmithKline Plc (GSK) (GSK.L) said on Monday it plans to raise its stake in its Indian pharmaceutical unit to up to 75 percent from 50.7 percent through an open offer in a deal worth about 629 million pounds ($1.02 billion).
With the latest India deal, GSK is set to spend close to $2 billion in roughly a year to increase its holdings in two listed Indian companies, underscoring the British drugmaker’s drive to deepen its footprint in emerging markets.
GlaxoSmithKline is to invest another 200 million pounds ($330 million) on advanced manufacturing in Britain, the company said on Wednesday, underlining the draw of a tax break designed to encourage research and development.
Britain’s so-called “patent box” scheme, which offers a reduced rate of corporation tax on income derived from patents, has been hailed by GSK, its biggest drugmaker, for transforming the country as a place to invest.
William Hanna Center for Innovation at Shady Grove, 9700 Great Seneca Hwy Rockville, MD 20850
Springboard Enterprises presents the Dolphin Tank, a pitch-practice event for life science entrepreneurs.
What is the format? Pre-selected presenters deliver a two- to three-minute elevator pitch (no slides!), followed by feedback from an expert panel. The audience also weighs in.
Who will pitch? Six to eight early-stage life science companies, or those with an idea for a new life science business. Those selected can pitch their idea/business on their own, or with a group.
What sectors? Life science, including biotechnology, medical devices, healthcare IT, pharmaceuticals, and diagnostics.
Men and women are encouraged to apply to pitch at this event.
Deadline to apply to pitch: Monday December, 16 at 12noon EST Expect an email from jennifer@sb.co within 24 hours of the pitch deadline to confirm whether you’ve been selected to pitch.
Instead of looking at pictures in textbooks or working with simulations on computers, high school students across Maryland have a chance to experiment with professional scientists while using the latest lab equipment.
The teens conduct these experiments, not in their classroom, but in a bus outfitted as a mobile laboratory,
The traveling Bio Lab recently visited Patapsco High School and Center for Arts in Baltimore, which delighted of their teacher.
The Indian Biomedical Association (IBA) invited entrepreneurs from early phase companies with products or services in the life sciences industry the opportunity to connect, collaborate and partner with investors. Following the event on Nov 17th [Developing and delivering effective investor presentation for your early stage venture], four companies were chosen to pitch in front of investors on Dec 17th, 2013. The four companies are: Neuronascent, RoosterBio, LiquiLens and OTOMAGNETICS.
Top Five Reasons You Should Attend:
1. Learn by Example- Listen carefully to how others pitch so that you can perfect your own!
2. Understand what seasoned investors expect in real life terms
3. Networking with like-minded professionals
4. Create your own Due Diligence process for investing
5. Building a vibrant entrepreneurial healthcare and life science community in the DC/MD/VA region – Be a Part of It!
What is your New Year resolution? Get your idea to the market with funding and resources? We can help you!
AccelerateBaltimore™ is an initiative of the Emerging Technology Centers, Baltimore’s award winning incubator, and Abell Foundation. In its first two years, we have invested $250,000 in 10 companies. Now, we are looking for the next 6 innovative startup technology companies to add our portfolio.
Apply by December 31, 2013 11:59pm!
Our goal is to close the gap between innovative ideas and getting to market by providing the seed capital, resources, mentors, potential partners and a coworking space. We are looking for 6 exciting startups that use modern technologies to create new business solutions that can be brought to market in 3 months.
Spring Capital Partners has completed fundraising for a $175 million fund that will invest in small to midsize companies.
The fund is the third — and largest — the Baltimore firm has raised since launching in 1999. Its first in 2000 raised $75 million. The second in 2006 raised $115 million.
Spring’s new fund will buy minority stakes in companies with $10 million to $150 million in revenue. Its investments will not be confined to specific industries, but will span a wide range of companies. Earlier investments have included manufacturers, information technology firms government contractors and software companies.
Our world is changing at an unprecedented pace. To prepare our students, lessons must go beyond the “3 R’s” and foster 21st century skills. Skills like critical thinking, communication, collaboration and creativity will be essential for students to take on the challenges and opportunities that lie ahead.
Note: As of August 6th, 2013, Smithsonian Student Travel is now known as EF Explore America. Please visit our website at http://www.efexploreamerica.com.
The Fort, one of the first startup accelerators in the D.C. area, may be closing its physical doors, but according to Jonathon Perrelli, managing director of Fortify Ventures, it will live on in a blog and in spirit at 1776.
“There’s a confusion that The Fort and Fortify Ventures are synonymous,” Perrelli explains. They aren’t. “We believe in accelerators,” he says, “and we want to support early-stage companies.” He and the team just don’t want to run an accelerator anymore.
When something like three in four venture-backed startups fail, picking the ones that won’t is definitely not an easy feat.
In search of what they call the “unicorn VCs” of healthcare – investors who have consistently invested in companies with the biggest of the big exits – analysts at research firm CB Insights combed through a decade of healthcare M&A data. They found 50 medical device and biotech companies that exited, through IPO or acquisition, with valuations of at least $500 million between 2004 and 2013.
DreamIt Ventures is raising a $30 million fund to further support its portfolio companies.
The five-year-old early-stage startup accelerator has raised $10 million so far, said managing partner Karen Griffith Gryga, who is raising the fund. The raise will go toward follow-on funding for the nearly 130 companies that have graduated from DreamIt’s programs in Philadelphia, New York City and Austin. (DreamIt’s latest program, DreamIt Health Baltimore, will launch in January 2014.)
Own an emerging cyber security company and need more cash to grow?
Maryland has set aside $3 million in tax incentives for companies seeking outside investments. Those investors must keep their money in the company for at least three years.
There has been some confusion over the tax credit so state officials are trying to get the word out that there’s money on the table.
Drexel University, the University City Science Center and DreamIt Ventures are on a mission to support innovators and entrepreneurs in the Philadelphia region and have formed a strategic partnership that creates a hub for start-ups to test their wings and the capital that will support their continued growth.
Drexel – Science Center Collaboration
Drexel and the Science Center have collaborated to form a 17,500-square-foot innovation hub that will serve as a launching pad for companies by offering business incubation and accelerator spaces and services to support idea generation, innovation and growth as well as support for later-stage companies.
NYC Economic Development Corporation president Kyle Kimball on New York City working with large pharmaceutical companies and venture capital firms to create $100M fund.
The following is an email sent by James P Gavigan, PhD, Head of the Science, Technology and Education Section, Delegation of the European Union to the United States of America regrading the Launch of Horizon 2020.
Dear All,
Please note that the EU’s new program to fund research and innovation activities from 2014-2020 – Horizon 2020 – was officially launched on 11 December 2013 with a first tranche of funding of Euros 7.8 billion being made available for calls for proposals in 2014 out of a total of almost 80 billion for the seven year period.
I enclose herewith the Press Release and an accompanying Memo announcing the launch:
I would also like to draw your attention to the new Horizon 2020 web portal which is the unique access point for all information on the program – its content, structure, how to participate, etc.:
There are currently more than 4 million Americans who have been unemployed for 27 weeks or more. This figure doesn’t include those who work part-time or on contracts — or those who, discouraged, have simply stopped trying. Many of them are older and well educated, and their situation doesn’t seem to be improving despite America’s slow crawl out of the recession. While last week’s jobs numbers extolled a decline in the national unemployment rate, the numbers for the long-term unemployed didn’t even budge.
MIT professor Ofer Sharone is tackling this issue head on, piloting a new initiative to help the long-term unemployed and gather valuable research on both job-seeking and hiring practices. He is also the author of the recent book Flawed System/Flawed Self: Job Searching and Unemployment Experiences. My edited discussion with Sharone is below.
I was manning a booth at the Harvard Club of New York’s authors’ night when an older woman approached and picked up a copy of my book, Reinventing You. She paged through it for a moment, then put it down. “Too late for me,” she said abruptly, and walked away.
Over the past six months of my book tour, it’s a question I’ve heard often. Isn’t professional reinvention just for young people? What if I’m too old? How can I spend years training for something new, when I’m already near retirement? It’s true: reinvention is different later in your career. But that doesn’t mean it’s impossible.
Being able to learn marketable digital skills is sluggish and difficult — or so they say.
Adda Birnir noticed a gender divide between a media company’s business and technical side (read: men) versus the editorial side (read: women). She created online tech education platform Skillcrush to give women a way to learn marketable skills that could lead to steady, high-paying jobs and relevant, satisfying work.
BioHealth Innovation (BHI) is a regionally-oriented, private-public partnership functioning as an innovation intermediary focused on commercializing market-relevant biohealth innovations and increasing access to early-stage funding in Maryland.
The information contained in this website and newsletters is for general information purposes only. The information is provided by BioHealth Innovation via its newsletters, but not written or endorsed in any way by BioHealth Innovation unless otherwise noted. While we endeavor to keep the information up to date and correct, we make no representations or warranties of any kind, express or implied, about the completeness, accuracy, reliability, suitability or availability with respect to the website or the information, products, services, or related graphics contained on the website for any purpose. Any reliance you place on such information is therefore strictly at your own risk.
Northwest Biotherapeutics, Inc. (NASDAQ: NWBO), a biotechnology company developing DCVax® personalized immune therapies for solid tumor cancers, has completed an underwritten public offering of 4,895,834 units at a public offering price of $4.80 per unit, resulting in gross proceeds of $23,500,000. Northwest also announced today that the underwriter has exercised in full its option to purchase an additional 734,374 units to cover over-allotments. Exercise of the over-allotment option increases the gross proceeds to the Company to $27,025,000.
Each unit consists of one share of common stock, and a warrant to purchase 0.5 shares of common stock at an exercise price of $6.00 per share. The warrants are immediately exercisable and expire on the fifth anniversary of the date of issuance. The shares of common stock and warrants are immediately separable and will be issued separately.
Emergent BioSolutions Inc.’s U.S. Health and Human Services contract to help produce flu vaccines in the event of a pandemic are key to the firm’s expansion, Chief Financial Officer Robert G. Kramer says.
The Baltimore Development Corp. on Wednesday confirmed that it is offering a second $250,000 new job creation tax incentive to Emergent.
On a trade mission to Brazil, Governor Martin O’Malley today announced that Brace Pharmaceuticals, an investment company created by EMS S/A, Brazil’s largest domestic pharmaceutical company, has opened its U.S. headquarters in Montgomery County and plans to invest $200 million into the new operation. The company, which is located in the Rockville Innovation Center, is focused on the late stage clinical development of pharmaceutical products with the potential for near-term commercialization. Brace invests in research and development companies’ efforts to successfully complete their clinical trials and seek FDA marketing approval. Brace recently entered into its first venture investment in a U.S. company with Gliknik, a Baltimore-based biopharmaceutical company that is creating new therapies for cancer and immune disorders. The announcement came after Governor O’Malley visited EMS headquarters near Sao Paulo and met with the company’s owner and Chairman, Carlos Sanchez and its Vice President of Strategy & Operations, Vinzenz Plorer, a member of the Maryland delegation to Brazil.
Brace Pharmaceuticals Inc., an arm of Brazilian pharma company EMS S/A, has established its U.S. headquarters in Rockville and will invest $200 million in the operation, the O’Malley administration said Tuesday.
Brace, based out of the Rockville Innovation Center, bills itself as an “investment company” focused on developing and commercializing late-stage clinical products. It is a backer of Baltimore-based biotech Gliknik.
Noble Life Sciences (Gaithersburg, MD) announced today that the company has been awarded a Technology Commercialization Fund (TCF) grant of $100,000 from the Maryland Technology Development Corporation (TEDCO). The grant will be used to develop assays to determine the effect of cancer treatments on metastatic cells derived directly from patients. Metastasis-initiating tumor cells isolated from the blood of cancer patients will be used to assay the activity of drugs both in culture and in novel metastatic mouse models developed using these invasive circulating tumor cells (CTCs).
Dr. Stephen Horrigan, Chief Scientific Officer of Noble Life Sciences, noted, “In over 90% of cancer deaths, metastasis, not the primary tumor, is responsible. Yet virtually all cancer drug development testing is based on activity in primary tumors. The development of these metastasis-associated assays will enable us to offer highly innovative services to clients who are developing novel therapeutic drugs, in particular those that target metastatic cancers and cancer stem cells. One goal of our development effort will be to demonstrate the ability to test ex vivo the sensitivity and resistance of metastasis-initiating invasive CTCs to candidate drugs. A second goal will be to create patient-derived metastasis mouse (PDM mouse) models thereby establishing mouse avatars for preclinical testing of human metastatic tumors.”
Please note that most links to RFAs, PAs, and Guide Notices will take you to the NIH Web site. RFPs will take you to FedBizOpps. Links to RFPs will not work past their proposal receipt date. Archived versions of RFPs posted on FedBizOpps can be found on the FedBizOpps site using the FedBizOpps search function. Under “Document to Search,” select Archived Documents.
When you speak with Dr. Joseph Loscalzo about the new Boston Biomedical Innovation Center, you can’t help but get excited about the prospects of enhancing the health of the nation by promoting greater commercialization of NIH-funded discovery science.
“We have all the people we need to make it work. We have all the resources now in hand that we need to make it work. So I think that we are in a very unique situation to prove that this concept is a valid one for the future development of technologies that spring from what the NIH supported over the years as basic investigation that can now be applied to patient care.”
It’s not uncommon for startups to fail, but DreamIt Health’s Managing Director Elliot Menschik and Psilos Group cofounder Lisa Suennen have noticed that some failures are more common than others. Specifically, the two investors said a poorly set up team or a startup that isn’t willing to change with technology leads to problems later on.
While Menschik focuses primarily on early stage startups at DreamIt Health, Suennen’s firm generally invests around $20 million in late stage startups. Still, the investors noted that failures of startups had similarities across the board.
The Tech Council of Maryland (TCM), Maryland’s largest trade association for technology and life science companies, today announced that it has partnered with Year Up National Capital Region (NCR) in a workforce development initiative designed to address the need of Maryland employers for skilled technical workers and provide urban young adults with the skills, experience and support they need to flourish in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) careers. Together the groups will host quarterly Workforce Development Roundtable discussions with TCM constituents in the region to discuss workforce initiatives, the first of which is scheduled for January 8 from 7:30 a.m. to 9:15 a.m.
“We welcome the opportunity to work with Year Up NCR to identify ways we can create a more robust pipeline of enthusiastic young adults seeking careers in the technology industry, who will meet our members’ growing demand for skilled workers,” said Philip Schiff, TCM’s CEO. “Year Up’s experience in empowering young adults with marketable skills and other opportunities will be valuable as we work together to consider the training, recruitment tactics, diversity programs, internships and employer/higher education partnerships required to build a competitive workforce.”
Maryland Industrial Partnerships (MIPS) promotes the development and commercialization of products and processes through industry/university research partnerships. MIPS provides matching funds to help Maryland companies pay for the university research. Projects are initiated by the companies to meet their own research and development goals.
The Life Sciences Manager is responsible for connecting Maryland companies to faculty and researchers in University System of Maryland institutions, plus St. Mary’s College of Maryland, and Morgan State University to address corporate technology development needs. The Manager facilitates the creation of academic-industrial R&D partnerships through the MIPS program, with a particular emphasis on biotechnology, medical and other life sciences. The Manager evaluates proposals on an ongoing basis and acts as a technical coordinator for the MIPS program by identifying the technical reviewers for proposals. Additionally, the Manager coordinates the economic development reviews on MIPS proposals and implements existing MIPS concepts, processes, tools and other procedures necessary to evaluate and monitor ongoing projects, and develop improved capabilities therein.
A Johns Hopkins undergraduate biomedical engineering student team headed by Indian American Piyush Poddar that devised a two-part system to improve the way life-saving shocks are delivered to hearts earned first prize in the undergraduate division of a national Collegiate Inventors Competition.
Winners in the Collegiate Inventors Competition, conducted by Invent Now and the National Inventors Hall of Fame, were announced Nov. 12 after the finalist teams presented their projects to contest judges at the United States Patent and Trademark Office in Alexandria, Va.
FRANCIS S. Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), has been distributing a chart that shows the success rate of grant applications to NIH for scientific research. While the rate was about 30 percent as recently as a decade ago, it has plunged to about 15 percent, which Dr. Collins says is the lowest in history. One reason for this is that more applicants are seeking funds, but the budget squeeze also is to blame. Dr. Collins is worried that the low success rate will cause young scientists and researchers to abandon the laboratory for other careers or to take their talents and ideas to other countries.
Baltimore has hired an Austin, Texas-based firm to develop an economic development strategic plan for the city.
The contract with AngelouEconomics which is not expected to exceed $167,500, will be paid for by the Baltimore Development Corp. Signed on Sept. 15, the contract is slated to expire at the end of March 2014, said Joann Logan, a BDC spokeswoman.
Each year, the State of Maryland continues to lead advancements and best practices in U.S. stem cell research through the Maryland Stem Cell Research Fund (MSCRF). To celebrate and share the most current research coming out of the state, more than 350 scientists, researchers, bioethicists, patient advocates, government officials and members of the public came together today to attend the Sixth Annual Maryland Stem Cell Research Symposium at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine Campus in Baltimore. Hosted by The Maryland Stem Cell Research Commission (Commission), the event delivered plenary sessions, concurrent presentations, more than 100 poster exhibits and 20 comprehensive scientific presentations on stem cell studies presented by Maryland researchers.
Lockheed Martin Corp. will formally open on Wednesday a Center for Health Innovation in Baltimore County to help the defense contractor delve deeper into the health care industry. The center, located within Lockheed’s offices on Lord Baltimore Drive near Woodlawn, will serve as a hub for Lockheed’s growing health care technology business.
The center will house existing technologies used by health care industry clients and serve as a place to develop new tools to address the industry’s needs.
The state of Maryland and NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., have embarked on a new partnership effort, the main goal of which is to attract high technology companies to Maryland, which in turn will enable both future missions of NASA and the economic future of Maryland.
The agreement, signed by U.S. Sen. Barbara Mikulski, Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley and Goddard Space Flight Center Director Chris Scolese will help in several ways. Goddard will obtain specialized skills and technologies needed for its numerous mission applications. It will help the center engage in technical exchanges with local tech companies regarding new trends, theories, techniques, and problems in aerospace technology. And finally, it will provide an opportunity for the development of local educational and labor resources specific to Goddard’s needs.
Flu or influenza (caused by influenza virus) is a miserable experience as it daunts the victim with countless sneezes, head aches and fever.
Flu develops when tiny droplets coughed or sneezed into the air by an infected person are inhaled by an uninfected person. Flu is often confused with common cold. But, they are different, though certain flu symptoms are the same. According to the University of Maryland Medical Center, fever and muscle pain associated with flu goes away with prevention and treatment in a day or two, however, fatigue may last for a week.
Few companies watch their bottom line with more anxiety than startup firms, but the ones who want to move into a new business accelerator in Columbia will need to think beyond revenue and expenses.
Howard County’s Conscious Venture Lab is on the hunt for fledgling companies practicing a form of what’s often called responsible or sustainable capitalism — businesses with aims that include but aren’t limited to profits. The accelerator’s organizers want firms that consider not just shareholders in their decisions but also a broad range of other “stakeholders” such as employees, suppliers and the environment.
GlaxoSmithKline has announced the formation of a consortium comprised of “six internationally-renowned comprehensive cancer centres”, three in North Americva and three in Europe.
In forming the Oncology Clinical and Translational Consortium (OCTC), GSK says it will benefit from the partners’ expertise in preclinical, translational and clinical development of novel anticancer therapeutics including kinase inhibitors, epigenome modulating compounds and immunotherapies. In return, the centres will have access to studies with GSK’s early-stage cancer pipeline “and opportunities to advance the next generation of novel oncology therapeutics”.
Strand Life Sciences Private Limited, a global life sciences company headquartered in Bangalore, is collaborating with the San Francisco Bay Area based El Camino Hospital to locate a Strand Center for Genomics and Personalized Medicine at the Genomic Medicine Institute of the El Camino Hospital to accelerate the adoption of next generation sequencing based research panels and counseling services by the physicians at the Hospital and its partner clinics.
A Letter of Understanding was signed on Wednesday December 4th by Dr. Vijay Chandru, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Strand Life Sciences and Dr. Eric A. Pifer, Chief Medical Officer of El Camino Hospital. This signals the start of a collaborative effort to bring advanced genomic tests in cardiology, oncology, pharmaco-genomics and personalized medicine to the community served by the El Camino Hospital, a community that has traditionally been an early adopter of high technology solutions.
Part of moving forward and progressing with health IT initiatives involves proactively setting new goals and establishing a roadmap for the future. The Workgroup for Electronic Data Interchange Foundation has taken this to task by releasing its 2013 report that puts forth recommendations for the health IT industry over the next decade.
Report officials outline 10 recommendations in four critical areas of focus including patient engagement, payment models, data exchange and interoperability and innovative encounter models.
Less than 10 percent of hospitals have warmed up to RFID technology. That’s the assessment of Mark Roberti, the founder and editor of RFID Journal, so it’s very much an emerging trend in healthcare. The idea is that by using resources more effectively, hospital staff can spend less time running around trying to find medical supplies and more time with patients.
“The reason why healthcare costs are so high is hospitals keep buying things they already have and waste money,” Roberti said at a conference organized by his Journal which focused on RFID in Healthcare. Hospitals have been so focused on the priority of saving lives that they have been slow to adopt technology that saves money.
ZocDoc dug into America’s “largest database of patient behavior” to discover the top patient trends of 2013.
ZocDoc makes it easy for people to book doctors appointments through its online booking service. More than 4 million patients use ZocDoc every month, and their interactions provide a wealth of data and insights that were never available before.
Each year, nearly $100 billion is spent in the United States on healthcare related research, with an increasing proportion of the breakthrough research being carried out in academic medical centers. While continued medical progress relies on enhanced academic-industry collaboration, the information available on the academic commercialization system function across these institutions is not uniform and often difficult to access.
The Medical Innovation Playbook is the first-ever comprehensive study of technological innovation and commercialization at the nation’s top healthcare centers.
As aging populations put a strain on cash-strapped governments, chronic illness and rare disease prevention is taking centre stage in healthcare. To meet new levels of demand, the sector is ramping up its innovative capacity through collaborations. But harnessing the disruptive potential of these partnerships is still very much a work in progress, according to participants of the INSEAD Healthcare Alumni Summit in Zurich in October this year.
Collaborations are widely seen by the sector as crucial to raise extra finance amid a credit crunch, share risk, boost research productivity, discover new therapies – and ultimately to reinvent the way healthcare is delivered. So large and small pharma companies, hospitals, pharmacy chains, venture capital firms, IT consultants, and academia are forming an array of partnerships.
Today, Sanofi US launched its second Partners in Patient Health (PiPH) Innovation Challenge: Collaborate | Innovate, which will award $100,000 to the winning team. This year’s theme is “Co-Creating for Breakthroughs: Moving toward a collaborative research and development ecosystem.” The Challenge calls on non-profit patient, provider and professional associations to partner with other associations and/or academic institutions to propose new approaches which translate patient insights into improvements in the drug development process.
A treatment breakthrough can cost billions of dollars and decades of time to research. Patient organizations are in the position of helping patients and their constituents to play an important role in research and development (R&D). Patient involvement in the entire process can lead to improvements in efficiency and effectiveness of industry efforts in developing new therapies.
The OneStart Americas competition, a partnership between Oxbridge Biotech Roundtable and SR One, the venture capital arm of GlaxoSmithKline, officially launched on November 4 at UCSF. The kick-off event was followed by similar events held this month in Los Angeles, San Diego and Boston.
OneStart Americas invites individuals or teams of burgeoning life science entrepreneurs under 36 years of age to apply in one of four tracks: drug discovery, medical devices, diagnostics, or health information technology. 35 selected semi-finalists will undergo two-months of extensive mentorship from venture capitalists, pharmaceutical executives, and other entrepreneurs in order to turn their idea into a comprehensive business plan.
Eight former pro football players learned this year that they have signs of a degenerative brain disorder called chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), a condition linked to depression, dementia, and memory loss. These somber findings were uncovered using a new method of brain imaging that, for the first time, enables researchers to spot signs of the condition in the living brain. Previously CTE could only be identified after a victim died.
The new method could help quantify the risks of repetitive blows to the head (see “Images of a Hard-Hitting Disease” and “Military Brains Donated for Trauma Research”). It could also help future players avoid the degenerative and sometimes lethal condition by limiting their exposure, and it may help scientists develop better protective gear and treatments.
In support of the Christie Administration’s commitment to nurturing the growth of emerging technology and biotechnology businesses, the New Jersey Economic Development Authority (EDA) announced that 65 companies have been approved to share the $60 million allocation available through the State’s Technology Business Tax Certificate Transfer Program in Fiscal Year 2013.
This competitive program enables technology and biotechnology companies to sell New Jersey tax losses and/or research and development tax credits to raise cash to finance their growth and operations. Since the program was established in 1999, more than 500 businesses have been approved for awards totaling $710 million. Each of the 65 applicants approved this year will receive an estimated $920,000, which is 15 percent more than last year and over double the Fiscal Year 2011 average.
From our genomes to Jawbones, the amount of data about health is exploding. Bringing on top Silicon Valley talent, one NYC hospital is preparing for a future where it can analyze and predict its patients’ health needs–and maybe change our understanding of disease.
The office of Jeff Hammerbacher at Mount Sinai’s Icahn School of Medicine sits in the middle of one of the most stark economic divides in the nation. To Hammerbacher’s south are New York City’s posh Upper East Side townhouses. To the north, the barrios of East Harlem.
Technology once used to help helicopters fly better will in the future be used to help patients breathe better.
InnoVital Systems, a spinoff of Beltsville defense contractor Techno-Sciences, will pair its experience developing technology for the military with medical research by MedStar Health and the Cleveland Clinic to create a new medical device. The InVent Diaphragm Assist is an implantable device that can help patients with respiratory illnesses breathe, instead of a ventilator system.
Revolution Growth is investing $22 million in Sweetgreen, an organic salad retail chain launched by three Georgetown grads in 2007 that has since expanded across the District and five states, the company announced Wednesday.
Sweetgreen is a relatively low-tech investment for Revolution Growth, a $450 million fund founded by Steve Case, Donn Davis and Ted Leonsis. Under the deal, Case will join Sweetgreen’s board. The funds will go toward national growth in “key markets,” as well as building the company’s “team and corporate culture, and growing community programs and marketing initiatives,” according to a news release.
Scientists have been toying for years with creating tiny implants and nanorobots that could carry drugs to certain diseased cells. It is about as targeted as therapy can get, but at this point it’s all a bit futuristic.
Within the confines of petri dishes, researchers are still tinkering. A new study is the first to demonstrate that a nanorobot, which the researchers are calling a DNA nanocage, can both encapsulate and release a biomolecule without degrading the cage itself — and at a size small enough to keep the drugs trapped until they reach the end target.
New York has built gleaming new research facilities and lured at least one large drug company, but the city still trails places such as Boston and San Francisco in fostering small companies that experiment with cutting-edge medical treatments.
To help the local biotechnology scene catch up, the Bloomberg administration is working with large pharmaceutical companies and venture capitalists to create a $100 million fund to invest in fledgling life sciences companies.
San Francisco-based Burrill & Company looked like it had beaten the odds a little more than a year ago during a tough time for biotech venture capital firms. Burrill said in a statement that it had put together Burrill Capital Fund IV, with “aggregate capital commitments” of $505 million to invest in drugs, diagnostics, medical devices, healthcare delivery, wellness, and digital health.
Actually, it turns out the fund raised about $200 million. Partly as a result of the size difference, the team responsible for investing the cash has split off from Burrill into a new venture firm called Biomark Capital, Xconomy has learned.
The fourth edition of Building Biotechnology, the premier biotechnology industry primer, is now available.
Building Biotechnology has been adopted by dozens of educational programs, and is on the nightstands of many biotech CEOs. The book covers a broad range of essential knowledge in business, regulations, patents, law, policy, and science.
Its image further enhanced by the recent IPO of Twitter, Silicon Valley now stands in many minds as the cutting edge of the American future. Some, on both right and left, believe that the Valley’s geeks should reform the nation, and the government, in their image.
Increasingly, the basic meme out of the Valley, and its boosters, is that, as one venture capitalist put it: “We need to run the experiment, to show what a society run by Silicon Valley looks like.” The rest of the country, that venture capitalist, Chamath Palihapitiya, recently argued, needs to recognize that “it’s becoming excruciatingly, obviously clear to everyone else, that where value is created is no longer in New York, it’s no longer in Washington, it’s no longer in L.A. It’s in San Francisco and the Bay Area.”
Back in August, I wrote about how the rich and famous were adopting health wearables. But what about the other end of the spectrum? Recent Pew data shows that lower income people are the most likely to have one or more chronic disease, but the least likely to use a health app. Developing mobile health technologies for low income and underserved populations doesn’t just have the potential to help those populations — it could also help the entrepreneurs that choose to take advantage of it.
BioHealth Innovation (BHI) is a regionally-oriented, private-public partnership functioning as an innovation intermediary focused on commercializing market-relevant biohealth innovations and increasing access to early-stage funding in Maryland.
The information contained in this website and newsletters is for general information purposes only. The information is provided by BioHealth Innovation via its newsletters, but not written or endorsed in any way by BioHealth Innovation unless otherwise noted. While we endeavor to keep the information up to date and correct, we make no representations or warranties of any kind, express or implied, about the completeness, accuracy, reliability, suitability or availability with respect to the website or the information, products, services, or related graphics contained on the website for any purpose. Any reliance you place on such information is therefore strictly at your own risk.
Johns Hopkins University has won a key court judgement in its disputed plan to develop a 108-acre donated farm into a $4.7 million “science city,” The Gazette reports.
The Maryland Court of Special Appeals ruled Thursday that the plan complies with the agreement forged between Johns Hopkins and Elizabeth Banks, who sold Belward Farm in 1989 for $5 million. In November 2011, Tim Newell, one of Banks’ relatives, sued Hopkins claiming the university was violating a land use agreement it made with Banks.
In 1837, entrepreneur and philanthropist Johns Hopkins bought a Federal-style mansion located on 300 acres in northeast Baltimore. Henry Thompson, a businessman and War of 1812 cavalry captain, had built the estate in 1803 and named it Clifton after his ancestral home in England. It became Hopkins’ summer home, where he liked to entertain family and friends, until his death in 1873. It’s where he welcomed the Prince of Wales, who became King Edward VII. It’s where he held a clandestine meeting that included Salmon Chase, secretary of the Treasury under President Abraham Lincoln; his friend John Work Garrett, the B&O Railroad president; and other B&O officials, who offered to use the rail for Union Army troop movements. And it’s where he hoped the university that would bear his name would be located
A new health information technology accelerator has caught the eye of one of Baltimore’s technology leaders.
Jason Hardebeck, executive director of the gb.tc, formerly the Greater Baltimore Technology Council, has been named managing director for DreamIt Health Baltimore. The accelerator is scheduled to launch in January.
Trevigen Inc. has been awarded $252,000 for the Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I Contract, 261201300042C, from the National Cancer Institute and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to develop a tumor-aligned 3D coculture system. Dr. Gabriel Benton is the Principal Investigator.
“Many anticancer drugs fail in human trials despite showing efficacy in in vitro studies and animal models. It has become clear that 2D in vitro monoculture assays do not reflect the complex cellular composition and microenvironment of the tumor tissue, and this may explain their failure to predict clinical efficacy” says Dr. Hynda Kleinman, former NIH PI.
A university team took first place in a health competition earlier this month after implementing a method to improve health care access for Americans.
This year’s American Public Health Association Codeathon event brought several teams from around the country to Boston on Nov. 1 to figure out how to put the Affordable Care Act into practice. The university’s team, Terrapin Health Transformers & Friends, brought together developers, coders, designers and health professionals to brainstorm their idea, said Kenyon Crowley, team leader and the Center for Health, Information and Decision Systems deputy director.
It wasn’t just another business competition for Scott Holland, it was the realization of a life-long dream.
Holland’s startup i-Lighting, a novel easy-to-install indoor and outdoor LED lighting system, was awarded $100,000 and other prizes in April 2013 during the inaugural InvestMaryland Challenge, a prestigious business competition by the Maryland Department of Business and Economic Development. Following weeks of rigorous judging and mentoring, his company beat out dozens of others, ranging from high-tech manufacturers to smart phone app developers, in the general category.
CDER’s mission is to protect and promote public health by helping to ensure that human drugs are safe and effective for their intended use, that they meet established quality standards, and that they are available to patients. The range and complexity of the human drug supply and development pipeline, and the global nature of regulated industry operations present unprecedented challenges to effective regulatory oversight. Effective and sustainable regulatory operations also require explicit recognition of agency resource limitations.
Once a month, Growlers Brew Pub in Gaithersburg is packed with people talking about the latest trends in the biotechnology and life sciences industries.
The people who gather at Growlers are biotechnology students, lab workers, human resources managers, job seekers, educators, scientists, entrepreneurs and vendors. They come for the camaraderie and the opportunity to connect with people in the bioscience industry.
MedStar Health and the Cleveland Clinic said Monday they’d signed a deal with a Maryland company to license patent rights for a medical device that would help patients with severe lung and neuromuscular diseases to breathe.
The deal comes two years after Columbia, Md.-based MedStar and the prestigious Cleveland Clinic’s technology transfer arm unveiled its alliance aimed at commercializing medical innovation.
The Evan Burfield of June 2000 was the archetypal startup wunderkind, the kind of overachiever who naturally invites unfavorable comparisons to yourself at the same age.
There was his skinny, almost teenaged face on The Washington Post’s website, accompanying a reader Q&A on how he built a financial software company, netDecide, instead of rowing at Dartmouth.
The fiasco with the $600 million federal health insurance website wasn’t all bureaucratic. Forcing slow and disparate databases run by government and insurance companies to work together in real time—and then launching the service all at once—would have challenged even technology wunderkinds.
In particular, the project was doomed by a relatively late decision that required applicants to open an account and let the site verify their identity, residence, and income before they could browse for insurance. That meant the site would have to interface in real-time with databases maintained by the Internal Revenue Service and other agencies.
Last summer when we were still waiting for the Supreme Court to rule on the Affordable Care Act, many people I talked to said that regardless of the decision, the wheels were in motion. Too much had already happened for the Court to get the horse back in the barn.
That may be true, but President Obama and the ACA got everything started on a national scale: the focus on reducing readmissions, on care coordination, on patient engagement. When would hospitals have started revamping the discharge process or getting serious about follow-up care without the stick of reduced reimbursements? When would doctors and hospitals and long-term care facilities have started really focusing on any of these serious problems without real incentives to do so?
Jason Hardebeck, whom many in Baltimore’s tech community know as the executive director of gb.tc, has been picked to lead DreamIt Ventures‘ new accelerator for health IT startups here.
Hardebeck will take on the role of managing director of DreamIt Health Baltimore, which will shuttle early-stage health care startups through a four-month program beginning in January, providing them with stipends of up to $50,000 in addition to other professional services. The program will be based out of Bond Street Wharf in Fells Point, a Johns Hopkins University property that DreamIt is leasing from the university.
Pharmaceutical giant GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) and US-based VC Avalon Ventures have announced the creation of the first of up to ten San Diego-based biotech firms as part of a $495m alliance signed in April.
Sitari Pharmaceuticals, which is using technology licensed from Stanford University, will receive a total of $10m from Avalon and GSK to get the San Diego-based company off the ground. The company will investigate treatments for celiac disease, an autoimmune disorder which targets the small intestine. Avalon also created COI Pharmaceuticals, a support firm which will supply people and infrastructure to Sitari and other firms to emerge from the alliance.
It’s frequently used to raise money for producing movies and recording CDs, but a Toronto hospital is hoping the crowdfunding craze can help get potentially life-saving treatment out of the lab and into the arms of the people who need it most.
For almost two decades, Dr. Gregory Czarnota, chief of radiation oncology at Sunnybrook Hospital, has been working with Michael Kolios, an associate dean in Ryerson University’s faculty of science, on software that could help better manage breast cancer treatments.
It’s been a relatively quiet year for facility investment projects from Merck KGaA, the life sciences and chemical firm that employs more than 38,000 around the world and reported 2012 revenues of more than US$15 billion. But the past fortnight has been something else entirely.
On Nov. 15, Merck announced an €80-million (US$108.3-million) investment in a new pharmaceutical manufacturing facility to be located in the Nantong Economical Technological Development Area (NETDA) in the Greater Shanghai region (Yangtze River Delta area).
Heart attacks, anaphylactic shock and clinical decision support for healthcare workers in rural clinics in developing countries. Those are the targets of a group of mobile health apps that could help decide the future of mhealth technology commercialization at the university. It’s part of a new program at the University of Pennsylvania.
Six apps were chosen by development firms who will produce prototypes for the Center for Technology Transfer. The first three were conceived by faculty from Penn’s Perelman School of Medicine and qualify for UpStart’s incubator program. A drug verifier app, developed by a Wharton business school student, will get advice from UpStart’s new student entrepreneur adviser program. Aside from Resuscor, each of them fit the description for the Noble Mobile category — an app to improve society.
A Chinese herbal medicine for liver ailments has cleared a big hurdle with regulators in the United States, but there’s still a long way to go.
For Tarek Hassanein, a professor of medicine at the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine, it took a long time to learn and finally to pronounce “fuzhenghuayu (FZHY)”. That’s the Chinese name of a patented Chinese drug that treats liver fibrosis, the scarring process of the liver from injuries and diseases.
Peter DeComo raised $20 million from investors for Renal Solutions Inc. in 2002, when the Pittsburgh medical device company had only a working prototype for an artificial kidney and no money.
During the next five years, he brought in $20 million more in capital before selling Renal Solutions to a German outfit in 2007 for nearly $200 million.
“That company couldn’t even get funded today,” lamented DeComo, the CEO of South Side-based ALung Technologies Inc., because venture capital investors have pulled back from startup companies in his industry.
You’ve cracked open the crate of cranberries, stuck the turkey in the oven and are well into filling your second muffin tin with cornbread batter. And just in time for dinner, MedCity is here to talk about innovative obesity treatments, both pharmaceutical options and medical devices.
The Netherlands has retained its position at the top of the annual Euro Health Consumer Index (EHCI) which compares healthcare systems in Europe.
On 48 indicators such as patient rights and information, accessibility, prevention and outcomes, the Netherlands secured its top position among 35 European countries for the fourth year in a row, scoring 870 of a maximum 1,000 points.
To say an IT project like HealthCare.gov was a large-scale, complex behemoth undertaking is an understatement, to say the least. All the myriad elements of the project must be successfully interconnected for it to function properly, which clearly did not occur.
Neglect any one of these elements and it can lead to “outright failure,” says Richard Spires a consultant who formerly served as the Department of Homeland Security’s chief information officer.
“Domain specificity is important.” It is so refreshing to hear a tech entrepreneur like Steve Blank say this. Blank has been worked with researchers and clinicians for almost three years to bring the lean startup philosophy to healthcare. This is one of his conclusions about the industry.
Many people trying to get healthcare into the 21st century – doctors, nurses, entrepreneurs, investors – have been frustrated by the obnoxious attitude that technology is the solution to everything. A few too many tech entrepreneurs have breezed into the health world with “the solution.”
BioHealth Innovation (BHI) is a regionally-oriented, private-public partnership functioning as an innovation intermediary focused on commercializing market-relevant biohealth innovations and increasing access to early-stage funding in Maryland.
The information contained in this website and newsletters is for general information purposes only. The information is provided by BioHealth Innovation via its newsletters, but not written or endorsed in any way by BioHealth Innovation unless otherwise noted. While we endeavor to keep the information up to date and correct, we make no representations or warranties of any kind, express or implied, about the completeness, accuracy, reliability, suitability or availability with respect to the website or the information, products, services, or related graphics contained on the website for any purpose. Any reliance you place on such information is therefore strictly at your own risk.
‘We need to provide high-quality education at a lower cost. If at the end of the day, this means there aren’t as many universities or some people don’t have jobs, you know, this is not a welfare business. We have the interest of the nation at stake. And this is what we all have to keep focused on—high quality and containing costs.’
QIAGEN has announced an agreement with Eli Lilly and Company to develop and commercialize a molecular companion diagnostic paired with a novel Lilly oncology compound. This is the third co-development project by QIAGEN and Lilly to create companion diagnostics, which are tests that analyze genomic information in patient samples to enable personalized decisions on treatments.
The latest collaboration, involving an undisclosed Lilly compound and an undisclosed molecular diagnostic target, builds on a master collaboration agreement for development of tailored therapies in cancer and other therapeutic areas signed earlier this year.
Imagine a website launched by students, for students to share information about their innovation ecosystem on campus. I’m talking a navigation tool of sorts that allows students from every corner of the country to learn about what effective strategies universities have developed to enhance resources for students interested in exploring the technology and entrepreneurship realms. No, this isn’t a dream. This website exists, and it goes by the name of “University Innovation.”
The wiki was initially created by the University Innovation Fellows, an elite group of 45 students that are a part of a national movement to catalyze innovation on campus. But they’ve now opened up the wiki for the whole world to enjoy as a “resource to all student stakeholders in the Technology, Innovation and Entrepreneurship spheres in higher education.”
Before 1960, the only way to treat cardiac arrest involved opening up the chest cavity and applying manual cardiac massage. The surgeon would take the heart in his hands and squeeze it ever so cautiously to a distinct rhythm in order to help pump blood to the brain and other important organs, giving the patient a chance at life once again. While a bold method, it was rarely attempted and more often than not didn’t prove successful.
So, taking this as an opportunity to try something new, surgeons at Johns Hopkins created a new Cardiopulmonary Resuscitation technique dubbed closed-chest cardiac massage. The group of surgeons with a knack for innovation created a way to pump the arrested heart without ever having to open up the patient.
Millennial Media, WeddingWire and RainKing Solutions led the list of Maryland companies making the 2013 Deloitte Technology Fast 500, a prestigious technology awards program in United States and Canada. Among Maryland’s eight repeat companies, United Therapeutics Corporation is on the list for the 13th straight year and Zenoss is on the list for the third straight year.
Overall, there were 15 Maryland companies on the list, up from 12 in 2012. Maryland’s 15 companies were the eighth most among states/provinces. California far outpaced other states with 166 companies, with Massachusetts, Ontario, New York, Washington and Pennsylvania following. Virginia had 16 companies on the list for the seventh most among states/provinces.
Baltimore is a top destination for students looking to attend college.
The Charm City has ranked eighth among major metro areas in the American Institute for Economic Research’s College Destinations Index for 2013 and 2014.
As reported in the Baltimore News Journal, Baltimore County Executive Kevin Kamenetz on Monday proposed a new department name and department head nominee for the County’s economic development agency.
The head of Maryland’s university system on Wednesday said higher education needs to embrace disruptive technologies such as massive online courses in an effort to serve more students and contain costs.
“If at the end of the day this means there aren’t as many universities or some people don’t have jobs, you know, this is not a welfare business,” William Kirwan, chancellor of the University System of Maryland, said at The Wall Street Journal’s CEO Council annual meeting. “We have the interests of the nation at stake.”
The state of Maryland and NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., have embarked on a new partnership effort, the main goal of which is to attract high technology companies to Maryland, which in turn will enable both future missions of NASA and the economic future of Maryland. The agreement, signed by U.S. Sen. Barbara Mikulski, Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley and Goddard Space Flight Center Director Chris Scolese will help in several ways. Goddard will obtain specialized skills and technologies needed for its numerous mission applications. It will help the center engage in technical exchanges with local tech companies regarding new trends, theories, techniques and problems in aerospace technology. And finally, it will provide an opportunity for the development of local educational and labor resources specific to Goddard’s needs.
Dr. Daniel Saltzman says he can prove that bacteria that ordinarily cause food poisoning in people can be modified for use as guided missiles to deliver cancer-killing payloads into tumors.
But he needs $500,000 for some preliminary work, and despite his project’s potential, he’s not holding his breath for funding from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the nation’s leading source of biomedical research grants.
QIAGEN (NASDAQ: QGEN; Frankfurt, Prime Standard: QIA) today announced an agreement with Eli Lilly and Company (NYSE: LLY) to develop and commercialize a molecular companion diagnostic paired with a novel Lilly oncology compound. This is the third co-development project by QIAGEN and Lilly to create companion diagnostics, which are tests that analyze genomic information in patient samples to enable personalized decisions on treatments. The latest collaboration, involving an undisclosed Lilly compound and an undisclosed molecular diagnostic target, builds on a master collaboration agreement for development of tailored therapies in cancer and other therapeutic areas signed earlier this year.
QIAGEN and Lilly are long-standing partners in personalized healthcare. QIAGEN’s therascreen(R) KRAS RGQ PCR Kit has been widely adopted by laboratories since its July 2012 approval by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) as a companion diagnostic. The therascreen KRAS Test detects gene mutations in metastatic colorectal cancer patients, indicating which ones will benefit from Erbitux. In September 2011, QIAGEN and Lilly partnered to develop a companion diagnostic that evaluates the Janus kinase 2 (JAK2) gene, which plays a role in some blood cancers. The test is paired with a Lilly compound to guide use of the proposed drug, currently in clinical trials.
The Symposium is the Maryland Stem Cell Research Fund premier event that delivers comprehensive scientific talks, poster presentations, Ethics discussions and networking time, enabling cell therapy basic research and technologies from the lab to pre-clinical and to commercialization.
With a powerful line-up of speakers and many opportunities for you to present your work in concurrent or poster presentations, the Symposium will follow the format and style of previous meetings with an additional networking time and an intimate environment.
Keynote Address: The John L. Kellermann, III Memorial Lecture
Keynote Speaker:
Rita Perlingeiro, Ph.D. Associate Professor & Lillehei Endowed Scholar Lillehei Heart Institute University of Minnesota
Many of today’s biotech companies don’t aspire to be companies at all. They’re more like temporary “virtual” projects, with skeleton crews of contractors who come together for a spell and then move on to the next thing. As others have observed, it’s much like what actors, directors and producers do to make movies in Hollywood.
That’s not how the enduring, independent biotech companies do it. These companies aspire to be bigger than any one individual, or any one product bound to lose patent protection in a few years. That means they need to do an old-fashioned thing—hire lots of smart people, give them good salaries and benefits, and challenge them to accomplish big things. Otherwise, there’s no way to carry out a long-term, lofty mission of creating valuable new products for patients.
A new business accelerator in Howard County has launched a crowdfunding campaign to get off the ground.
Conscious Venture Lab in Columbia is looking to raise $50,000 through the crowdfunding website Indiegogo, which allows users to set fundraising goals and generate donations from online supporters. The Howard County Economic Development Authority and the Maryland Center for Entrepreneurship, part of the development authority, will match the money Conscious Venture Lab raises through its crowdfunding campaign.
With the cost of drug development hitting the $5 billion mark and 94 percent of drugs failing at some point in clinical development, pharmaceutical companies have been turning to new tools to help clinical trial design: computers and robots.
A couple of Wall Street Journal articles highlight this trend.
One notes that in June, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and the European Medicines Agency endorsed a simulator from the Critical Path Institute to help develop Alzheimer’s disease treatments. Additional simulators are in the works for tuberculosis, Huntington’s disease and Parkinson’s disease.
GlaxoSmithKline’s $500 million portfolio with Avalon Ventures invested in its in first startup – Palo Alto-based Sitari Pharmaceuticals.
According to Fierce Biotech, the San Diego-based venture group and its partners at GSK are funding Sitari with $10 million in cash and research support, with the R&D assist coming from the pharma giant.
The pharmaceutical industry needs better scientific models for testing drugs before they get to the proving ground of human clinical trials. Current lab dish models and animal testing models are time-consuming, expensive and chronically unable to predict which drugs are going to work in clinical trials. The industry is crying out for new modes of early testing that can shorten the timelines, reduce the cost and increase the odds of success in clinical trials.
Both lab dish models and animal models have run into serious limitations. Cell culture (“in vitro”) assays offer some real advantages. Many can provide true, “human” answers to fairly simple questions. But they lack complexity.
Open innovation is not new, but it is relatively new to health care, igniting a broad cross-section of challenges, hackathons, and competitions that seek to identify breakthrough solutions to solve for our health and our health care. By applying the best practices of the leading tech accelerators, these programs accelerate the speed at which new solutions are developed, companies are formed, and jobs are created.
To quote Todd Park, CTO of the United States of America, “There has never been a better time to be an entrepreneur at the intersection of health care and IT.” And there has never been a better time, or industry, for open innovation, a game where no one loses. Open innovation is good for the sponsoring organization, good for the innovator, good for the patient, and good for America.
It’s more than likely that the readers of the NPQ Newswire may not be all that heavily involved in scientific research, but for those who are, the impact of federal budget cuts on agencies such as the National Institutes of Health and other federal agencies supporting scientific research have been devastating. For example, in fiscal 2013, the NIH had its budget cut (per sequestration) by 5 percent, roughly $1.5 billion, which meant that 640 research grants were not issued. As this Mediaite table shows, the NIH may be the largest funder of biomedical research in the world, but its appropriations have plummeted from over $31 billion in 2010 to a projected $27 billion in 2014:
Several pharmaceutical companies such as Johnson & Johnson (NYSE: JNJ), Merck (NYSE: MRK) , and Bayer (NYSE: have been taking steps to infuse their pipelines with new drug drugs by developing incubators to identify life science innovations that fit in with their longterm goals. Now Celgene (NASDAQ: CELG) is collaborating with a biotech incubator backed by early stage life science and healthcare investor Versant Ventures, according to a company statement.
BioHealth Innovation (BHI) is a regionally-oriented, private-public partnership functioning as an innovation intermediary focused on commercializing market-relevant biohealth innovations and increasing access to early-stage funding in Maryland.
The information contained in this website and newsletters is for general information purposes only. The information is provided by BioHealth Innovation via its newsletters, but not written or endorsed in any way by BioHealth Innovation unless otherwise noted. While we endeavor to keep the information up to date and correct, we make no representations or warranties of any kind, express or implied, about the completeness, accuracy, reliability, suitability or availability with respect to the website or the information, products, services, or related graphics contained on the website for any purpose. Any reliance you place on such information is therefore strictly at your own risk.
Gaithersburg-based biotech MedImmune has appointed Yong-Jun Liu, chief scientific officer of the Baylor Research Institute, as its new head of research.
The appointment puts Liu in a pivotal role, not just for MedImmune but also for its parent company, AstraZeneca, which is depending on its U.S.-based biologics arm to supply a pipeline of early-stage drug candidates.
The University of Maryland on Wednesday announced the appointment of Thomas R. Fuerst, Ph.D., as the new director of the Institute for Bioscience and Biotechnology Research.
IBBR is a joint research enterprise created to enhance collaboration among the University of Maryland, College Park (UMD), the University of Maryland, Baltimore (UMB), and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in the fields of medicine, biosciences, technology, quantitative sciences and engineering.
Physician’s Choice Laboratory Services (PCLS) announced today that it has recently partnered with Genesys Biolabs, a division of 20/20 GeneSystems, Inc. (Rockville, MD) to offer PAULA’s Test (Protein Assay Using Lung Cancer Analytes), a simple blood test that aids physicians in the early detection of lung cancer.
“As an enthusiastic proponent of personalized medicine, PCLS is pleased to partner with 20/20 GeneSystems to promote their newest assay for early stage detection of lung cancer, PAULA’s Test. This test will be of great value to the physicians and patients affected in communities PCLS serves. Lung cancer is a curable disease when caught early and risk-directed screening will save lives as well as reduce the total cost of treatment. The test is a beneficial leap forward for high-risk individuals, providers, and the healthcare system,” said Joe Wiegel, President of PCLS.
Johns Hopkins undergraduate students have invented a system to shock a dangerously irregular heart back into normal rhythm more safely and effectively.
The two-component system is designed both to expand a doctor’s options in routing electric current through the heart and to improve the application of pressure to the patient’s body to help treatment succeed.
Two more venture capital firms have been selected to receive InvestMD funds that they will invest in local startup companies.
EnerTech Capital Partners will receive $10 million and Foundation Medical Partners will receive $7 million. As part of the state’s InvestMaryland program, the firms will use it to back local startup companies. After a startup exits, the state gets 100 percent of its principal investment and 80 percent of the proceeds from the exit. The venture firms can keep the remaining 20 percent of the proceeds.
New Enterprise Associates has had a hand in a number of Boston’s biotech startups over the years. But it wasn’t until now that the big VC firm officially put a physical footprint in the biotech cluster in Cambridge, MA.
NEA today is announcing that it has opened an office in Kendall Square. It’s on the third floor at 700 Tech Square in Cambridge, and will serve as a local home base for the VC firm and its healthcare partners, many of which serve on boards in the area. NEA already has offices in New York, California, Washington, D.C, Chicago, China, and India.
QIAGEN (NASDAQ: QGEN; Frankfurt, Prime Standard: QIA) today announced an agreement with Eli Lilly and Company (NYSE: LLY) to develop and commercialize a molecular companion diagnostic paired with a novel Lilly oncology compound. This is the third co-development project by QIAGEN and Lilly to create companion diagnostics, which are tests that analyze genomic information in patient samples to enable personalized decisions on treatments. The latest collaboration, involving an undisclosed Lilly compound and an undisclosed molecular diagnostic target, builds on a master collaboration agreement for development of tailored therapies in cancer and other therapeutic areas signed earlier this year.
QIAGEN and Lilly are long-standing partners in personalized healthcare. QIAGEN’s therascreen® KRAS RGQ PCR Kit has been widely adopted by laboratories since its July 2012 approval by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) as a companion diagnostic. The therascreen KRAS Test detects gene mutations in metastatic colorectal cancer patients, indicating which ones will benefit from Erbitux. In September 2011, QIAGEN and Lilly partnered to develop a companion diagnostic that evaluates the Janus kinase 2 (JAK2) gene, which plays a role in some blood cancers. The test is paired with a Lilly compound to guide use of the proposed drug, currently in clinical trials.
GlaxoSmithKline and Theravance’s new inhaled lung drug Relvar has been approved in Europe to treat both asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), confirming an endorsement from regulators in September.
The medicine, which is inhaled through a palm-sized device called Ellipta, consists of a corticosteroid to reduce inflammation and a novel long-acting beta-agonist (LABA), which is designed to open the airways.
A Cambridge company developing new drugs focused around DNA damage and genetically defined cancers has attracted investment from another pharma giant, Pfizer, in its latest funding round, a £20 million Series B.
Pfizer Venture Investments was the only new investor in Mission Therapeutics’ Series B round, which was led by existing investor Sofinnova Partners and also included Imperial Innovations, SR One and Roche Venture Fund, which means it now has three major pharmaceutical companies backing it – SR One is GlaxoSmithKline’s corporate healthcare VC fund.
Johns Hopkins is more than halfway to its $4.5 billion fundraising goal, the university announced Wednesday, with the money helping to support initiatives that include urban revitalization and global health.
More than 162,000 donors have helped Hopkins meet the halfway mark earlier than officials had previously expected, in spring 2014. The $4.5 billion fundraising goal is among the biggest such efforts in the country and the largest for the Johns Hopkins University and Johns Hopkins Hospital.
The Professor Venture Fair began at Bioscience Day 2007 and has become an annual event that gives faculty inventors the opportunity to pitch their new technologies to a team of venture capitalists and entrepreneurs from the region. Presenters are judged based upon clarity of pitch and commercial viability.
Bioscience Day 2013 Venture Fair 11:00 am – 12:00 n
Moderator: Gayatri Varma, Director, OTC
Presenters and INventors: Anthony Melchiorri and John Fisher; Yanjin Zhang; Hadar Ben-Yoav, Reza Ghodssi, Gregory Payne and Deanna L. Kelly ;Kenyon Crowley, Ritu Agarwal , Guodong “Gordon” Gao, Nanette I Steinle and Arnab Ray; Donald DeVoe
Judges:Todd Chappell, Wyatt Somogyi, Matt Cohen, Stephen P. Auvil
Location: Grand Ballroom Lounge, Stamp Student Union
Theme: “The First Mile of a Marathon”. The theme explores the next steps towards commercialization of University developed technologies. Most inventors painstakingly develop their technologies, and yet, underestimate the herculean task of moving an idea from the lab to launch. Even before funding, there is a lot of heavy lifting, analysis, customer discovery, team building, etc. that needs to be done. The panel speakers will discuss these next steps that every inventor or potential entrepreneur has to undertake.
Moderator: Elana Fine, Managing Director, Dingman Center for Entrepreneurship
Panelists: Todd Chappell, Wyatt Somogyi, Matt Cohen, Stephen P. Auvil
Location: Grand Ballroom Lounge, Student Stamp Union, UMCP
This NIH Funding Opportunity Announcement (FOA) invites applications to support an Evaluation and Administration Coordinating Center. This unit will facilitate the coordination among and between the awardees of RFA-HL-14-019 “Low-Cost, Pragmatic, Patient-Centered Randomized Controlled Intervention Trials (UH2/UH3)” and the NIH. This unit will also be responsible for conducting an evaluation of the RFA-HL-14-019 program.
Using scores obtained from cognitive tests, Johns Hopkins researchers think they have developed a model that could help determine whether memory loss in older adults is benign or a stop on the way to Alzheimer’s disease.
The risk of developing dementia increases markedly when a person is diagnosed with mild cognitive impairment, a noticeable and measurable decline in intellectual abilities that does not seriously interfere with daily life. But physicians have no reliable way to predict which people with mild cognitive impairment are likely to be in the 5 to 10 percent a year who progress to dementia.
Mary Washington Healthcare (MWHC) and Zebrareach today announced a collaboration that provides MWHC’s more than 4,000 Associates free membership to Zebrareach, a smartphone application that gives employees loyalty discounts at local stores, as well as other special offers negotiated for MWHC. The Zebrareach membership program for MWHC will launch in November 2013.
Zebrareach (http://zebrareach.com) is a mobile customer engagement application for small business that builds customer retention through a free consumer smartphone application. Businesses build and manage volume and tier-based loyalty programs, message exclusive news, product announcements, special events, secret menu items, limited time offers and more to their loyal customers. Customers are able to place orders for products and services through the web and mobile Zebrareach application. Zebrareach works for all customers, with or without mobile phones.
An earlier research brief we’d issued highlighted that Silicon Valley dominates the list of top 50 VC-backed tech exits. The post generated a fair amount of chatter including some comments calling us arrogant Silicon Valley’ites (we’re based in NYC).
Among the more constructive comments were several from healthcare VCs who wondered if the data would be similar for the healthcare sector. The prevailing hypothesis was that Silicon Valley’s dominance wouldn’t translate to healthcare (or perhaps not as much). Note: our healthcare classification includes companies ranging from medical devices to biotech to pharma.
Billlionaire investor Mark Cuban, who owns the Dallas Mavericks and Landmark Theaters and is a regular on Shark Tank, has expanded his interests to personalized health. He is part of a group of investors in mobile health startup, Validic,which raised $760,000 in a seed round. The Durham, North Carolina company has developed a platform to integrate and aggregate data from more than 80 health-oriented apps.
Cuban said this about the investment:
“Personalized health is the future of healthcare…and with the explosive growth of new mobile apps and devices coming on the market, Validic solves a fundamental problem of integrating all those new innovations into the healthcare system. I’m very excited for the future of Validic and the mobile health space.”
In the past few years, pharmaceutical distributor Cardinal Health (NYSE:CAH) has acquired a major distributor and half a dozen pharmaceutical companies in China. It also acquired AssuraMed to enter the home-health supply market, and invested in startups including HealthSpot, which makes a telemedicine kiosk, and Intralign, which helps providers optimize the cost and quality of surgical care.
Those moves were all part of a clearly defined strategy to meet the changing healthcare marketplace. John Rademacher, president of ambulatory care at Cardinal Health, told BioOhio members at the trade group’s annual event on Tuesday that the company’s investment and acquisition strategy is driven by these 12 healthcare industry trends:
Big data may be about to overwhelm the healthcare system. A little healthcare business intelligence tip: Data by itself won’t drive value and outcomes. Smart healthcare analytics will. In Deloitte’s DBrief, “Big Data Revolution: Unlocking Healthcare Analytics,” healthcare industry experts talked about the opportunities and barriers for industries across the care continuum to harness data, contextualize it and use it to move from hindsight to insight (and eventually, with the help of predictive analytics, foresight).
“The future is already here,” Brett Davis, a principal at Deloitte, said. “It just hasn’t been evenly distributed yet.” Here are the six key trends in healthcare shaping how data will be used.
Much has been written about the pharmaceutical industry’s R&D-productivity challenge during the past decade: the decline in new-drug approvals has raised discovery and development costs just as companies struggle to find new drugs to replace blockbusters that have lost (or will soon lose) their exclusivity. Yet by one important measure, the output of the pharmaceutical R&D process has accelerated significantly: the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved 39 new drugs in 2012—the highest level in a decade.
We’ve heard a lot this year about the IPO boom for biotech companies. Even after a few high-profile blowups (Ariad, Sarepta), the public biotech stock indexes are still outperforming the Nasdaq Composite Index and S&P 500. Some biotechs have been acquired for megabucks (Onyx, ViroPharma). We’ve heard about another biotech bubble in the making.
Apply Now to be a Presenting Company at Bio€quity Europe 2014
Now celebrating its 15th meeting, Bio€quity Europe is the premier industry event for financial dealmakers looking for investor-validated life science companies positioning themselves to attract capital and for pharma licensing professionals to assess top biotech prospects. Bio€quity Europe has showcased more than 600 leading European companies to thousands of investment and pharma business development professionals. Delegates from over 20 nations attended Bio€quity Europe last year.
Present Your Story to the Financial Community
Each Presenting Company provides a thorough 25-minute overview to fund managers, venture capitalists and pharma business development and licensing professionals.
Special “Next Wave” sessions feature young innovator companies and consist of eight-minute presentations on the company, technology and programs. In addition, the turf-neutral setting provides unique access to a cross-section of sellside analysts, investment bankers, and business development professionals from top-tier pharmaceutical and biotech companies in a single location.
Special events and private meeting space allow Presenting Companies, “Next Wave” presenters and Sponsors to network and conduct one-on-one meetings with the delegates throughout the two-day event.
Last week, the nation’s leading heart organizations released a sweeping new set of guidelines for lowering cholesterol, along with an online calculator meant to help doctors assess risks and treatment options. But, in a major embarrassment to the health groups, the calculator appears to greatly overestimate risk, so much so that it could mistakenly suggest that millions more people are candidates for statin drugs.
The apparent problem prompted one leading cardiologist, a past president of the American College of Cardiology, to call on Sunday for a halt to the implementation of the new guidelines.
A patient with abdominal pain dies from a ruptured appendix after a doctor fails to do a complete physical exam. A biopsy comes back positive for prostate cancer, but no one follows up when the lab result gets misplaced. A child’s fever and rash are diagnosed as a viral illness, but they turn out to be a much more serious case of bacterial meningitis.
Such devastating errors lead to permanent damage or death for as many as 160,000 patients each year, according to researchers at Johns Hopkins University. Not only are diagnostic problems more common than other medical mistakes—and more likely to harm patients—but they’re also the leading cause of malpractice claims, accounting for 35% of nearly $39 billion in payouts in the U.S. from 1986 to 2010, measured in 2011 dollars, according to Johns Hopkins.
IBM has made its Watson cognitive computing technology available as a cloud-based app development platform, and healthcare vendors are already getting in on the act.
Company officials they hope to encourage new uses of the fast-evolving technology and spur a slew of innovative apps. In this new marketplace, they say, developers of all sizes and industries can access resources – developer toolkits, educational materials and access to Watson’s application programming interface – for developing Watson-powered technology of their own.
Mark Cuban’s comments about personalized health may have turned a few heads but as one source soberly reminded us, he is not the first or the only billionaire investor in healthcare. Not by a long shot. Several people who have nine zeroes in their net worth have invested in the space. They’re motivated by emerging mobile health technology to help reduce healthcare costs and see it as playing a critical role in the future of healthcare technology. There are also philanthropic considerations to increase access to healthcare in underserved populations.
MhealthInsight reckons there are about 19 billionaire investors in mobile health, including Cuban. Here are some highlights from that list.
For budding startups, accumulating funding is necessary — but difficult. Crowdfunding can be a viable alternative for entrepreneurs.
That was one key takeaway for the few hundred part-time and aspiring entrepreneurs gathered at the Entrepreneurs Inspiring Entrepreneurs Expo at the BWI Marriott Monday who caught the “Sourcing the Crowd” panel discussion.
Paul Silber had some unexpected advice from a venture capitalist for the entrepreneurs who crowded a conference room at the BWI Airport Marriott Monday hoping to find out how to land some VC cash.
Silber’s suggestion: tap all other sources first, like friends and family and angel investors, before looking to a venture capital firm for funding.
We’ve all done it. You throw your clothes in a bag and head to the airport. Sixteen hours later, you’re in a country where the customs, dress, language and food are very different from home. As you leave the airport, you stop at an ATM, and within seconds have enough local currency for a taxi and a few meals. All you needed was an ATM card and some money in the bank.
In fact, your trip is going really well until you slip on some ice and fall down a flight of stairs. As you tumble to the bottom and see your femur bone break through the skin, you wonder whether you will be awake to tell the hospital about your allergy to local anesthetics and your heart disease, which has left you with an abnormal heart rhythm.
BioHealth Innovation (BHI) is a regionally-oriented, private-public partnership functioning as an innovation intermediary focused on commercializing market-relevant biohealth innovations and increasing access to early-stage funding in Maryland.
The information contained in this website and newsletters is for general information purposes only. The information is provided by BioHealth Innovation via its newsletters, but not written or endorsed in any way by BioHealth Innovation unless otherwise noted. While we endeavor to keep the information up to date and correct, we make no representations or warranties of any kind, express or implied, about the completeness, accuracy, reliability, suitability or availability with respect to the website or the information, products, services, or related graphics contained on the website for any purpose. Any reliance you place on such information is therefore strictly at your own risk.
DreamIt Health Baltimore is a healthtech accelerator that will select up to ten startups from around the world to take up residence in the heart of Charm City and achieve in four months what might otherwise take years. The program is designed to help these teams tackle significant problems in the healthcare industry and achieve critical business milestones. We do this by enabling access to people and resources normally out of reach, by removing as many obstacles as possible, and with guidance from successful entrepreneurs who have been there before and done it before. Participants will have the opportunity to work closely with all corners of Johns Hopkins and tap into the region’s wealth of federal healthcare institutions including CMS, FDA and NIH. The capstone of the program, Demo Day, gives these teams the opportunity to unveil their products and progress before a few hundred early-stage investors and key industry figures.
Tuesday, November 12, 2013 from 8:30 AM to 11:30 AM (EST)
Rescheduled due the government shutdown, this event is to gather interested small businesses seeking assistance from the Small Business Innovation Research grants program within the National Institutes of Health. This is a free event brought to you by BioHealth Innovation. Hear from the largest SBIR awarding Institutes on current Institute funding priorities. Meet one-on-one with program managers regarding your current project. Learn of SBIR assistance provided by BioHealth Innovation.
Email Ethan Byler, ebyler@biohealthinnovation.org to request a one-on-one meeting with one of the program managers from NCI, NIAID, or NHLBI.
The Indian Biomedical Association (IBA) is inviting entrepreneurs from early phase companies with products or services in the life sciences industry the opportunity to connect, collaborate and partner with investors.
Entrepreneurs should submit their presentations for IBA’s event on “Developing and delivering effective investor presentation for your early stage venture” by 10/31/2013 for the event to be held on Tue November 19, 2013, 6:00 – 8:00 PM. Location: Johns Hopkins University, Room 121, Building 3, 9605 Medical Center Dr, Rockville, MD.20850
Selected companies will be invited to make their pitch to a panel of experts who will provide critical feedback.
Following the above event, a short list of selected companies will be invited to make their presentation to a group of investors on Tue December 17, 2013, 6:00 – 8:00 PM, at IBA’s “Biomedical Innovation Funding Forum“. Location: Johns Hopkins University, Room 121, Building 3, 9605 Medical Center Dr, Rockville, MD, 20850
Emergent BioSolutions Inc. presented preclinical data on its lead bispecific Adaptir therapeutic, ES414, at the 5th Annual Protein and Antibody Engineering Summit (PEGS) in Lisbon, Portugal. The ES414 molecule was constructed using Emergent’s Adaptir technology platform and is being developed as a potential therapeutic for metastatic castration-resistant prostate cancer (mCRPC).
The presentation shared results of preclinical studies demonstrating ES414 is pharmacologically active and well tolerated. Preclinical in vitro and in vivo studies have shown ES414 redirects T-cell cytotoxicity (RTCC) towards prostate cancer cells expressing prostate specific membrane antigen (PSMA), an antigen commonly found on prostate cancer cells. The ES414 molecule selectively binds and links the T cell receptor on cytotoxic T cells to the PSMA on tumor cells, triggering tumor cell destruction.
BD Diagnostics, a segment of BD (Becton, Dickinson and Company), a leading global medical technology company, announced today at EUROGIN 2013 that the Company has achieved CE/IVD marking of its BD Totalys(TM) MultiProcessor, an automated instrument that integrates the pre-processing for the BD SurePath(TM) Liquid-based Pap Test with a molecular aliquot, maintaining sample integrity while improving efficiency in the lab. The Company also supported a symposium at the conference which highlighted the performance of the new BD Onclarity(TM) HPV Assay on the BD Viper(TM) LT System, which is pending EU certification.
“These new products are part of BD’s integrated Women’s Health portfolio and support full sample chain of custody, high diagnostic accuracy and a clear patient management approach – all important elements to improving patient care,” said Paul Holt, Global Market Segment Leader, Women’s Health & Cancer – BD Diagnostics. “When laboratories and physicians partner with BD Diagnostics, they benefit from highly customized, leading-edge solutions for the rapidly changing landscape of cervical cancer screening.”
The University of Maryland BioPark announced today that the Clinical Trial Center for Functional Foods (CTCF2) has signed a lease for office space at the BioPark. The main home for the CTCF2 is located in the Jeolla-buk Province of South Korea, and is part of the Chonbuk National University Hospital.
“When the BioPark was founded, we had the goal of establishing a strong presence from the international life sciences community,” said Jane Shaab, University of Maryland Research Park Corporation Senior Vice President and Executive Director of the UM BioPark. “We began building this presence with the SNBL Clinical Pharmacology Center, which is a wholly owned subsidiary of a Japanese biomedical company, and now we have our first investor from Korea.”
A merger of the University System of Maryland and the Southern Maryland Higher Education Center is one step closer after leaders signed an agreement this month for a new building at the California campus.
A merger could open up educational and business opportunities for the region, officials said Friday during a signing agreement at the Chesapeake Biological Laboratory in Solomons.
The increasing digitization of healthcare could shake up the industry in many ways, from allowing doctors to do their jobs more efficiently to reducing demand for specialists, according to a new study from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.
How technological changes will increase access and improve quality of care is still a moving target, however, according to the new study, published today in Health Affairs. Meanwhile, a different set of researchers found that one technological intervention improved access to care for depression, but had no impact on depressive symptoms.
GSK today announced the recruitment of 140 new apprentices over the next two years in the UK – of which a third will be in engineering. This represents a 27% increase in the company’s annual intake of apprentices since 2012/13.
GSK also announced plans to increase the number of engineering graduate trainees by 26 in Britain – an increase of 25% since 2012/13.
DreamIt Health, a new health startup incubator that paired entrepreneurs around Philadelphia with experts from Independence Blue Cross and Penn Medicine to help commercialize new ideas, is now venturing down I-95 to expand into the city of Baltimore. We spoke with Elliot Menschik, MD, PhD, who manages DreamIt Health, about the goals of the new venture and the opportunities it plans to offer to Baltimore’s medtech entrepreneurs.
Social networks have been all “abuzz” over the past month getting the vote out for the most important elected-position in the region.
No … silly … we are not talking about elected officials in our neighboring Commonwealth, we are talking about what really matters — the Pitch Across Maryland 2.0!!!
Today is the day we tallied the view-votes for the “Fan Favorite” competition of the Pitch Across Maryland.
Now on its sixth run, the Research Commercialization Introductory Course is a very popular online course designed to help science and engineering researchers better understand how research commercialization works. Over 5000 students, faculty and researchers from across the US have taken this course since it’s been offered.
Research commercialization involves taking articles, documentation, know-how, patents, and copyrights, which are created during research activities and getting them to users and patients for real societal impacts. In some cases, commercialization involved taking patents based on the research and licensing them to a company. This usually involves also having the researchers consult to the company. In other cases, commercialization involves forming of creating a startup and applying to federally funded commercialization programs. In all cases, though, research commercialization typically involves defining the nature of the research being commercialized (e.g., in a patent or intellectual property agreement), establishing a commercial relationship with another party (e.g., employment, a sale or license), and negotiating a contract (e.g., compensation).
Newly-minted MBA graduates are more frequently turning away from finance jobs as financial crisis aftereffects linger and instead picking careers in the tech sector.
In fact, for the first time, more Stanford Graduate School of Business grads this year chose tech jobs over finance jobs, The Wall Street Journal reports. Thirty-two percent of this year’s class picked tech while 26 percent headed into finance — those figures were 13 percent and 36 percent, respectively, two years ago.
The Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) will hold its second annual Parent STEMpowerment Workshop on Nov. 17, in the Kossiakoff Center on its Laurel, Md. campus. The free workshop, from 2 p.m. to 5 p.m., is designed to help parents of elementary and middle school students prepare their children to explore careers in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM).
The event, developed for parents with little or no exposure to STEM fields, will provide resources to support children in the pursuit of STEM careers and impart a better understanding of the importance of STEM.
Furthering a commitment to bilateral innovation, a delegation of five biomedical and information technology companies from the University of Nizhny Novgorod visited the University of Maryland on October 16-25 under the auspices of the U.S.-Russia Innovation Corridor. The companies participated in the first region-to-region visit of Russian startups under the program since UMD and UNN signed a Memorandum of Understanding in April 2013 to deepen ties in the biomedical industry.
Johns Hopkins University has an acceptance rate under 20 percent. It’s clearly a prestigious institution. But what is it like to interview for a job at the region’s largest private employer?
I hit the books hard to go through Glassdoor’s index of user-submitted interview questions. Here are the three geekiest interview questions asked at Johns Hopkins (pertaining to different jobs, of course). Take a moment to see if you can answer them.
GSK has selected eight winners in its first Discovery Fast Track competition, designed to translate academic research into starting points for new potential medicines. The contest attracted 142 entries across 17 therapeutic areas from 70 universities, academic research institutions, clinics and hospitals in the US and Canada.
The winning projects show clear opportunities to deal with important unmet medical needs, including antibiotics resistance, diseases of the developing world and certain cancer types. The selected scientists will collaborate with GSK’s Discovery Partnerships with Academia (DPAc) team, the sponsor of the competition, to rapidly screen and identify novel compounds to test their promising hypotheses. If advanced chemical testing is successful, the winning investigators could be offered a DPAc partnership to further refine molecules and assess their potential as novel new medicines.
After the trip UNN participants were interviewed and filled the Feedback forms (see the Appendix). The results of interviews and feedback forms processing may be summarized as follows.
State government agency expenditures for research and development totaled $1.404 billion in FY 2011, an 11.3% increase over the $1.261 billion reported in FY 2010. Expenditures for R&D facilities (construction projects, major building renovations, and land and building acquisitions intended primarily for R&D use) totaled $109 million in FY 2011, a 1.7% increase over the $107 million reported in FY 2010. This InfoBrief presents summary statistics from the FY 2010 and FY 2011 Survey of State Government Research and Development, sponsored by the National Science Foundation (NSF).
The FY 2010 and FY 2011 survey presents the most recent NSF statistics of R&D activities performed and funded by state government agencies in each of the 50 states, the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico. Survey data are available by state and by individual state agency. For the first time, NSF collected two fiscal years of data from state governments as part of a single survey operation. In addition, a new category was added to this survey, so state agencies were given the option to separately classify their energy-related R&D expenditures. Other R&D categories include agriculture, environment and natural resources, health, transportation, and other.
Wednesday, Nov. 20, 2013, Southeastern Universities Research Association
In 2010, the University of Virginia created a pan-university innovation initiative designed to elevate innovation, entrepreneurship, and translational research as core competencies and key strategic priorities of the institution. A long-time practitioner of “traditional technology transfer”, UVa sought nothing less than a “sea change” in its innovation ecosystem and culture in creating this new innovation platform. Intellectual property is still protected, marketed and licensed (i.e., “traditional technology transfer”). But beyond these activities, the university has nurtured an ecosystem (both within the institution and beyond) which can be leveraged to identify innovation and knowledge assets more broadly and earlier; to advance those assets through proof-of-principle and commercial relevance assessments; and to leverage such assets and relationships to create products, services, companies, and jobs – and value for the university. Along the way, UVa Innovation actively uses its research capacities, social media, crowd-funding, grand challenge competitions, outreach and networking, and relentless “innovation proselytizing” to engage increasing numbers of university students, faculty, staff, administrators, alumni, and supporters in elevating innovation as core competency and focal point of UVa’s mission.
Nearly 6,000 people took part in the second annual Baltimore Innovation Week at the end of September, in partnership with many great organizations throughout the region. Full disclosure, we at Technical.ly Baltimore helped lead the big open calendar of events. Find a wrap video and some outcomes of the week below. This year, we saw […]
Okay. The verdict’s still out on loud. (If my family–myself included–is any indicator, that’s probably a losing battle.) The point is our human capital is plummeting globally thanks to our poor health, according to the World Economic Forum’s new Human Capital report. Our obesity and fast-paced lives are bound to catch up with us with heart disease and diabetes among other chronic disease. But it could come around and kick us where it collectively hurts the most: our already hurting economy.
Another massive acquisition by MedImmune and a new fund to uncover the next ARM lit up a vibrant October when deals in the Cambridge UK technology cluster topped $900 million.
It took the seventh month total in Business Weekly’s Cambridge Cluster Deals Digest to just over $23 billion. While MedImmune splashed the most cash, it was a home-grown innovation that had the Cambridge investment community buzzing.
BioHealth Innovation (BHI) is a regionally-oriented, private-public partnership functioning as an innovation intermediary focused on commercializing market-relevant biohealth innovations and increasing access to early-stage funding in Maryland.
The information contained in this website and newsletters is for general information purposes only. The information is provided by BioHealth Innovation via its newsletters, but not written or endorsed in any way by BioHealth Innovation unless otherwise noted. While we endeavor to keep the information up to date and correct, we make no representations or warranties of any kind, express or implied, about the completeness, accuracy, reliability, suitability or availability with respect to the website or the information, products, services, or related graphics contained on the website for any purpose. Any reliance you place on such information is therefore strictly at your own risk.
Attend the last DreamIt Health information sessions on Tuesday, November 5, 2013 from 6:00 pm – 7:00 pm at the Johns Hopkins Brain Science Institute and Wednesday, November 6, 2013 from 5:30 pm – 7:30 pm at the Johns Hopkins University Montgomery County Campus.
DreamIt Health is a health tech accelerator that helps startups achieve in four months what might otherwise take years to accomplish. The program has helped launch 130 IT companies to date.
DreamIt Managing Partner Elliot Menschik will present on November 5 and BioHealth Innovation’s Ethan Byler will present on November 6. These free programs will answer questions about Dreamit, and lite fare will be provided.
Tuesday, November 12, 2013 from 8:30 AM to 11:30 AM (EST)
Rescheduled due the government shutdown, this event is to gather interested small businesses seeking assistance from the Small Business Innovation Research grants program within the National Institutes of Health. This is a free event brought to you by BioHealth Innovation. Hear from the largest SBIR awarding Institutes on current Institute funding priorities. Meet one-on-one with program managers regarding your current project. Learn of SBIR assistance provided by BioHealth Innovation.
Email Ethan Byler, ebyler@biohealthinnovation.org to request a one-on-one meeting with one of the program managers from NCI, NIAID, or NHLBI.
DreamIt Health Baltimore is a healthtech accelerator that will select up to ten startups from around the world to take up residence in the heart of Charm City and achieve in four months what might otherwise take years. The program is designed to help these teams tackle significant problems in the healthcare industry and achieve critical business milestones. We do this by enabling access to people and resources normally out of reach, by removing as many obstacles as possible, and with guidance from successful entrepreneurs who have been there before and done it before. Participants will have the opportunity to work closely with all corners of Johns Hopkins and tap into the region’s wealth of federal healthcare institutions including CMS, FDA and NIH. The capstone of the program, Demo Day, gives these teams the opportunity to unveil their products and progress before a few hundred early-stage investors and key industry figures.
Johns Hopkins Montgomery County Campus Executive Director Elaine Amir retired Sept. 30. On an interim basis, Leslie Ford Weber is serving as campus executive director.
Leslie knows her way around Johns Hopkins and Montgomery County. She is director of government and community affairs for Montgomery County, representing both the university and the Johns Hopkins health system in their interactions with county elected officials, businesses and other external organizations. Before joining Government and Community Affairs, Leslie held a dual role as executive vice president of the Suburban Hospital Foundation and senior vice president of Government and Community Relations for Suburban Hospital.
The number of Maryland companies receiving venture capital increased to 26 in the 3rd quarter of 2013, doubling the number of deals in the 2nd quarter. The 26 deals totaled $140 million, according to the latest PWCMoneytree report. Nationally venture capital investment activity rose 12% in terms of dollars and 5% in the number of deals compared to the second quarter of 2013. More than half of the deals were early and seed stage deals, signaling optimism among the report’s sponsors regarding “the future of innovation and the vibrancy of the startup ecosystem.”
Federal health care reform has been catching a bit of flack the last few weeks, as health insurance exchanges continue to experience severe technical difficulties.
But it’s not all bad. At a panel Thursday on health care information technology, Carolyn Quattrocki, who leads the governor’s Office of Health Care Reform, said that companies with bright ideas about how to use technology to improve health care policies are “so critical — and becoming more critical.”
Between federal health reform, a cache of federal agency headquarters and notable health care brands like Johns Hopkins, Maryland is a prime spot for up-and-coming health IT companies. But despite a wealth of resources, M. Jason Brooke had to look hard to find the help he and his business partner needed to launch their medical device company.
To help pave a smoother path for others, Brooke and a team of other entrepreneurs have organized Maryland HealthTech Coalition. The group is designed to bring together health IT companies to share ideas, contacts and resources.
Noble Life Sciences, a provider of preclinical research services to pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies, announced that its animal facility was awarded full accreditation by the Association for Assessment and Accreditation of Laboratory Animal Care (AAALAC International). AAALAC assessment and accreditation programs are designed to recognize organizations that demonstrate excellence in animal care and use.
Organizations volunteer to participate in AAALAC’s program in addition to complying with local, state and federal laws that regulate use of animals in research. Accreditation was awarded following submission of a detailed program description and an in-depth review of the program and facility during an on-site visit by AAALAC representatives. In addition, Noble is currently licensed by the United States Department Of Agriculture (USDA) and meets the assurance requirements of the National Institutes of Health’s Office of Laboratory Animal Welfare (OLAW).
GrayBug LLC, a startup ophthalmic drug company spun out of Johns Hopkins University’s Wilmer Eye Institute, has hired its first full-time CEO and raised $1.5 million in new venture capital funding.
Michael O’Rourke, a veteran pharmaceutical industry executive and consultant, joined Baltimore-based GrayBug on Oct. 15. He comes to the company as it closed $1.5 million in funding from investors including the Maryland Venture Fund, the Abell Foundation and Brown Advisory, the Baltimore asset management firm.
To generate its list of the top 10 U.S. regions in which to secure a biotech job, GEN adopted a straightforward methodology. It identified the regions most frequently cited in biotechnology and pharmaceutical job listings. Over the past month, GEN collected data by scrutinizing five employment websites—LinkedIn, BioSpace, Medzilla, Indeed, and Monster.
The locales with the most biopharma-related jobs include the regular suspects—San Francisco and Boston—and also up and comers like the New York metropolitan area, which has grown steadily over the last few years.
Join the Society of Physician Entrepreneurs and Women in Bio as we host a panel of life science leaders who will share insights from their experience commercializing technology. The discussion facilitated by Lynn Johnson Langer, PhD, MBA, Director, Enterprise & Regulatory Science Programs, Johns Hopkins University will cover:
Gaithersburg-based GlycoMimetics Inc. set the terms for its upcoming IPO on Monday, planning to sell 4 million shares at between $14 and $16 apiece.
The biotech expects to list on the NASDAQ under the ticker symbol GLYC. It would be the third in an already active stretch for Maryland life sciences IPOs, following Intrexon Corp. and MacroGenics Inc. to the public markets.
Type 2 diabetes is viewed as one of the biggest drivers of healthcare costs partly because of the complications that can arise from the condition. Diabetes costs in 2012, for example, reached $245 billion. One complication — hyperglycemia – can cause diabetic coma if it remains untreated. WellDoc is working on a way to predict hyperglycemia without patients needing to have continuous glucose monitoring. The plan is to add the mhealth tool to its prescription mobile app platform Bluestar, which the company is preparing to roll out.
It presented positive findings from a study of the hyperglycemia prediction tool at the Diabetes Technology meeting in San Francisco this week, according to a company statement.
Vaccine manufacturers are often criticized for investing in shots aimed at high-margin Western markets, while neglecting diseases affecting the developing world. This week, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation set up a project to spur development in neglected areas by cutting the financial risk of early research.
GlaxoSmithKline ($GSK) and Sanofi ($SNY) are the first companies to sign up to the project, called the Vaccine Discovery Partnership (VxDP). Under VxDP, the Gates Foundation will work directly with biopharma companies on projects that further its goals and span from preclinical through to Phase IIa. By providing financial support for the projects, the Gates Foundation hopes to make early-phase vaccine research a less risky proposition for the industry.
Bioscience Research & Technology Review Day is a special event that features research talks, presentations, mini-symposia, and demonstrations by university scientists. The program provides a unique opportunity for executives and professionals in industry and government to:
Discover the most recent advances in bioscience and biotechnology at the University of Maryland
Promote the potential for academic-industry-government collaboration
Meet University scientists and interact with graduate student researchers
Network with colleagues who share an interest in the promotion of bioscience and the bioscience industry
Recruit employees and investigate job opportunities
For the ninth year Kevin Plank, Founder & CEO of Under Armour, will partner with the University of Maryland’s Robert H. Smith School of Business to host one of the nation’s toughest business competitions. There’s $115K on the line, and how does access to Kevin Plank’s professional network sound? Apply by January 6, 2014. Visit our web site to learn more about Plank’s story and commitment to entrepreneurship. The elegibility, timeline, prize breakdown and more is listed below. Don’t miss the chance to pitch your business to Plank and other top judges.
Application Deadline: January 6, 2014
Semifinal Round: February 21, 2014 @ Under Armour Headquarters, Baltimore, MD
Final Competition: April 4, 2014 @ Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center, University of Maryland
BD (Becton, Dickinson and Company) (NYSE:BDX), a leading global medical technology company, together with Direct Relief and the National Association of Community Health Centers (NACHC), today launched BD Helping Build Healthy CommunitiesSM, a four-year initiative that will expand access and improve care for underserved and vulnerable populations in the U.S. The initiative, first announced earlier this year with a founding pledge at the Clinton Health Matters Initiative, includes a BD commitment of approximately $5 million in cash and product to clinics and community health centers (CCHCs) employing innovative models of care, along with strategic support from all
James Ramsey could easily move his business to where he lives in Eastern Virginia, but Maryland is just too rich in his opinion.
He would rather drive more than three hours each way every week to a house he rents in Baltimore to keep his business in Maryland. That’s because with all the neighboring colleges in the state, he thinks the talent pool is too good to pass up.
A new report released today by The Science Coalition illustrates one of the many returns on investment of federally funded scientific research: the creation of new companies. Sparking Economic Growth 2.0 highlights 100 companies that trace their roots to federally funded university research and their role in bringing transformational innovations to market, creating new jobs and contributing to economic growth. An accompanying online database provides free access to company profiles and allows users to sort companies by federal funding agency, university affiliation, type of innovation and other criteria.
The National Science Foundation has awarded collaborative grants totaling $892,587 to three universities to develop data mining tools for electronic health record systems, FierceEMR reports.
The grants were distributed to: Southern Methodist University in Dallas; University of Texas at Arlington; and University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas.
Online health information company WebMD has snapped up Avado, a startup that develops cloud-based software to let physicians and patients interact.
The companies declined to disclose financial information, but said Avado’s technology will be integrated under the WebMD brand and that the founders will join the company to continue developing the technology and business relationships.
For $99, genetic testing startup 23andMe will analyze your DNA, telling you how to live smarter and longer–and what disease might kill you. But there’s another inner frontier to explore in personalized medicine: the bacteria in your gut.
For $89, Ubiome, a startup founded by Jessica Richman–a doctoral candidate at Oxford who did stints at Google and McKinsey after graduating from Stanford in 2009–will send you a kit that harvests the organisms that live inside your body. For additional fees, you can also gather bacteria from your mouth, nose, skin, and genitalia.
The typical university research park is 119 acres (just over 48 hectares), has seven buildings open and is located in a suburban jurisdiction with a population of 500,000 or less.
But urban-style live-work-play campuses are where they’re going, typified by Centennial Campus (affiliated with North Carolina State University), Mission Bay (affiliated with the University of California San Francisco) and the Fitzsimons Life Science District in Colorado (affiliated with the University of Colorado’s academic medical center).
The Life Sciences Discovery Fund (LSDF) has posted a revised 2012-2013 Granting Programs Request for Proposals (RFP) at http://www.lsdfa.org/documents/pdfs/LSDF_2012-2013_Granting_Programs_RFP.pdf that includes the following important changes:
Opportunity grant principal investigators must confer with LSDF programs staff before pre-proposal submission.
For Opportunity grants, only co-investments that are made contemporaneously with LSDF funding are counted as leverage. LSDF does not consider past funding (i.e., monies previously committed, received, or expended) or future predictions of funding as leverage.
Opportunity grant pre-proposals may undergo review by LSDF-convened external expert panels prior to evaluation by the LSDF Board of Trustees.
Regulatory consultation expenses are allowable if they inform the conduct of the proposed research and development activities.
Principal investigators are encouraged to bring up to two additional individuals to the pre-proposal and full proposal interviews.
For-profit applicant organizations will be required to provide a certificate of existence, certificate of incorporation, or a business license with their proposals.
Board of Trustees award decision meeting dates have been updated.
If a full proposal is submitted under this RFP but not funded, the principal investigator may resubmit the full proposal without having to submit a new pre-proposal, provided that the principal investigator, applicant organization, and scope of work are the same in the resubmitted proposal as in the original proposal (as determined solely by LSDF).
All invitations to submit a full proposal under this RFP expire on July 23, 2013.
Fidelity Biosciences and REGENX Biosciences today announced the formation of Dimension Therapeutics, a gene therapy company focused on developing novel treatments for rare diseases. Dimension will focus on advancing its platform of gene therapy programs in rare diseases through clinical development, starting with lead programs in hemophilia, and building out a world-class product engine for AAV therapeutics. Dimension has completed an undisclosed Series A financing led by Fidelity Biosciences.
In conjunction with its launch, Dimension has entered into an exclusive license and collaboration with REGENX. REGENX holds exclusive rights to a portfolio of over 100 patents and patent applications pertaining to its NAV® vector technology that includes novel AAV vectors such as rAAV7, rAAV8, rAAV9, and rAAVrh10. Through its license and collaboration with REGENX, Dimension has acquired preferred access to NAV vector technology and rights in REGENX product programs in multiple rare disease indications.
Site Selection for Life Sciences Companies,” a report released this month by business intelligence firm Venture Valuation and KPMG, uses an agglomeration of other reports and proprietary data to analyze key decision factors relevant to the leading life sciences clusters in France, Germany, Ireland, the Netherlands, Switzerland and the UK.
Why those territories? The authors say those countries are often preferred by foreign companies seeking European or global headquarters. But depending on which factors are emphasized and how they’re weighted, any of the six might stand above the rest.
1776, the downtown startup hub that launched earlier this year with a grant from D.C. Mayor Vincent Gray’s administration, has recruited Gray staffer David Zipper to head its for-profit venture arm.
Zipper was instrumental in mustering the mayor’s support behind the initiative located at 1133 15th St. NW, which combines co-working, startup education, events and mentorship under one roof and brand. 1776 has so far received some $380,000 from the District, $200,000 of which went toward the initial 15,000 square foot build-out, with the rest funding the Challenge Cup global startup competition.
BioHealth Innovation (BHI) is a regionally-oriented, private-public partnership functioning as an innovation intermediary focused on commercializing market-relevant biohealth innovations and increasing access to early-stage funding in Maryland.
The information contained in this website and newsletters is for general information purposes only. The information is provided by BioHealth Innovation via its newsletters, but not written or endorsed in any way by BioHealth Innovation unless otherwise noted. While we endeavor to keep the information up to date and correct, we make no representations or warranties of any kind, express or implied, about the completeness, accuracy, reliability, suitability or availability with respect to the website or the information, products, services, or related graphics contained on the website for any purpose. Any reliance you place on such information is therefore strictly at your own risk.
Montgomery County Executive Ike Leggett returned recently from a 10-day, 4-city trip to China aimed at advancing Chinese jobs and investment in the County and opening doors for County businesses there, as well as establishing a “Sister City” relationship with the city of Xi’an, with eight million residents and home to the famous Terra Cotta Army.
Packed with visits to businesses and high-tech centers, educational institutions and hospitals, as well as government meetings, the delegation’s itinerary reflected the mission’s strong focus on education and business development. Multi-level partnerships were developed on education, healthcare, and business fronts.
DreamIt Health Baltimore is a healthtech accelerator that will select up to ten startups from around the world to take up residence in the heart of Charm City and achieve in four months what might otherwise take years. The program is designed to help these teams tackle significant problems in the healthcare industry and achieve critical business milestones. We do this by enabling access to people and resources normally out of reach, by removing as many obstacles as possible, and with guidance from successful entrepreneurs who have been there before and done it before. Participants will have the opportunity to work closely with all corners of Johns Hopkins and tap into the region’s wealth of federal healthcare institutions including CMS, FDA and NIH. The capstone of the program, Demo Day, gives these teams the opportunity to unveil their products and progress before a few hundred early-stage investors and key industry figures.
Tuesday, November 12, 2013 from 8:30 AM to 11:30 AM (EST)
Rescheduled due the government shutdown, this event is to gather interested small businesses seeking assistance from the Small Business Innovation Research grants program within the National Institutes of Health. This is a free event brought to you by BioHealth Innovation. Hear from the largest SBIR awarding Institutes on current Institute funding priorities. Meet one-on-one with program managers regarding your current project. Learn of SBIR assistance provided by BioHealth Innovation.
Email Ethan Byler, ebyler@biohealthinnovation.org to request a one-on-one meeting with one of the program managers from NCI, NIAID, or NHLBI.
November 6-9, 2013, The Universities at Shady Grove Conference Center
The Korea-Maryland, USA Bio Expo is the premier event to building collaborations in the biotech industry with Korea. This year the Expo will showcase 40 exhibitors, over a 100 companies from Korea, and provide seminars for pharmaceutical development. Korean government officials will be on hand to discuss programs and initiatives that the Korean Central Government is rolling out to assist foreign companies looking to open into the Asian markets. The companies participating in the Expo are interested in licensing technologies for future development and investing in U.S. technologies. Attendees are encouraged to reach Joe Lee at jlee@jgbli.com to register.
The Korea-Maryland, USA Bio Expo is free to attend and more information can be found at www.kmbioexpo.com.
Join BioBuzz and their sponsor Fujifilm Diosynth Biotechnologies along with many others from the local biotech industry at another exciting BioBuzz event on October 30th from 4:30 – 7:00 p.m. in Gaithersburg at Growlers in Old Towne Gaithersburg!
Cybersecurity companies in Montgomery County will be eligible for tax credits starting next year as part of the county’s mission to become a national hub for companies that sell cybersecurity products to the private sector.
The Washington region is emerging as a hotbed for the cybersecurity industry, in part because of its proximity to federal agencies, the military and government contractors.
The Economic Alliance of Greater Baltimore (EAGB) is pleased to announce Wes Moore as the keynote speaker at its Annual Meeting. The event will take place December 11, 2013 at the Hilton Baltimore. Year after year, this celebration attracts the region’s top leaders from industry, higher education and government.
Wes Moore, a Baltimore City native, is a youth advocate, Army combat veteran, social entrepreneur and host of Beyond Belief on the Oprah Winfrey Network. Moore, a Johns Hopkins graduate, became nationally known after publishing The Other Wes Moore which became an instant New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestseller. It details the disparate life journeys of two boys from Maryland with the same name — one who went to prison and the other (the author) who forged a successful career.
For six years, green energy business Clean Currents made the Rockville Innovation Center above the downtown Rockville library its home.
The company enjoyed reduced costs for spaces and certain services than it would have had in the general private market. It had access to shared conference rooms, administrative help, a kitchen and copy machine, all pretty much financed by Montgomery County.
The Johns Hopkins University regained a five-year, $70 million federal grant designed to change how researchers pursue drug development and other medical treatments, but the University of Maryland, Baltimore lost its first bid for a similar grant, the National Institutes of Health said Tuesday.
The award pleased Hopkins officials, who had been forced to tweak their proposal for the grant after their application wasn’t renewed in 2012. The university received $80 million through the program, which focuses on what is known as “translational” research, from 2007 through 2011.
When WellDoc was founded in 2005, it was one of the first companies that sought 510(k) clearance for its patient and physician facing mobile health DiabetesManager platform. By putting its flagship apps through the discipline of clinical trials that generated positive results, it has helped earn confidence from physicians to prescribe it to their patients. Insurance companies are providing reimbursement for physicians and that has been critical for the company’s growth.
The Baltimore, Maryland-based company’s fundraise last year of about $8.4 million, in an amended Form D filing today, shows that confidence in the company is building. In a phone interview with WellDoc Chief Strategy and Commercial Officer Chris Bergstrom, he said the company continues to be entirely funded by angel investors who are flexing more power as Super Angels. “Each year we have brought on a higher caliber of angel investors. We’re really raising angel money at an institutional investor level.” He added: “It’s a great time and place for institutional investors, but angel investors can provide as much strategic value as institutional investors.”
QIAGEN N.V. today announced a partnership with Clovis Oncology CLVS +1.11% to co-develop and co-commercialize a companion diagnostic test to guide the use of CO-1686, a novel Clovis Oncology product candidate currently in clinical development. The Clovis drug candidate will initially target an unmet clinical need in patients with epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR) driven non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) for whom current EGFR-inhibiting drugs no longer control disease.
The diagnostic will build on QIAGEN’s therascreen® EGFR RGQ PCR Kit, which was approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in July 2013 as a companion diagnostic for use in the treatment of metastatic NSCLC in patients whose tumors have certain EGFR mutations. Analytical performance of the therascreen EGFR test has been established for 21 EGFR mutations, including the most prevalent resistance mutation, T790M. The test supports efficient laboratory workflow with real-time PCR technology on the FDA approved Rotor-Gene Q MDx, which is part of the QIAsymphony family of laboratory solutions.
Becton, Dickinson and Company (BD) has launched shortest ever insulin syringe needle for the first time in Hyderabad. The needle is 25 per cent shorter than the contemporary needles available in the market.
BD, a leading global medical technology company, has launched BD Glide 6mm needle, the smallest ever insulin syringe needle developed with TBL technology for the first time in India. The needle has been designed to improve patient comfort. Compared to present needle size, 80 per cent patients have preferred this new needle.
Towson University is getting more serious about entrepreneurship on campus, and Frank Bonsal III will play a big role in that new focus.
Bonsal has served as interim director for TowsonGlobal, the university’s business incubator, since June. Earlier this month, he became the university’s first director of entreprene
Venture capital deals in the Greater Baltimore area jumped in the third quarter, as investors poured money into medical device makers, biotech firms and one of the region’s largest money managers.
VC firms invested $445.7 million in 53 companies in the Baltimore-Washington area in the three months ended Sept. 30. That was up from $420 million invested in 30 companies in the second quarter and the highest level in almost six years, according to the MoneyTree report from PricewaterhouseCoopers and the National Venture Capital Association. The report uses data from Thomson Reuters.
Between October 1 and 17, the federal government ceased all nonessential operations because of a partisan stalemate over Obamacare. Although it is premature to declare this the greatest example of misgovernance in modern U.S. Congressional history, this impasse ranks highly.
One casualty of the showdown was any consideration of changes to lessen the impact of the across-the-board sequestration cuts that began on March 1. The cuts have caused economic and other distress across the nation, including serious impacts within the health care sector. Nearly eight months into sequestration, we can move beyond predictions and begin to quantify these effects.
Please note that most links to RFAs, PAs, and Guide Notices will take you to the NIH Web site. RFPs will take you to FedBizOpps. Links to RFPs will not work past their proposal receipt date. Archived versions of RFPs posted on FedBizOpps can be found on the FedBizOpps site using the FedBizOpps search function. Under “Document to Search,” select Archived Documents.
The economy works like a simple machine. But many people don’t understand it— or they don’t agree on how it works — and this has led to a lot of needless economic suffering. I feel a deep sense of responsibility to share my simple but practical economic template. Though it’s unconventional, it has helped me to anticipate and sidestep the global financial crisis, and has worked well for me for over 30 years.
The city’s once-grungy northern districts have transformed into a thriving area with hip boutiques, destination restaurants, and a homegrown art and nightlife scene.
With mHealth becoming the norm instead of the exception, a panel at Partners HealthCare’s 10th Annual Connected Health Symposium last week concluded that EHR vendors will have to find a way to modify their products to focus on data that the patient and his or her care team want, or they’ll become obsolete.
Important information for a patient’s care actually exists outside the electronic medical record, panelists said.
The National Institutes of Health aims to boost healthcare technology and science through 15 Institutional Clinical and Translational Science Awards. Total amount of the awards is $79 million in 2013.
The awards will be used to help translate basic discoveries into new treatments that tangibly improve human health requires innovative collaborations and resources, as well as a diverse, highly-trained workforce,” NIH officials said in announcing the awards on Oct. 22.
Crowdfunding moved closer to becoming a reality for small businesses Wednesday morning when the Securities and Exchange Commission proposed rules that will govern how shares in small companies are sold through Internet intermediaries.
The SEC took only 50 minutes to unanimously approve the proposed rules, which were issued more than 560 days after the JOBS Act, the law that legalized the use of crowdfunding for equity investments, was signed by President Barack Obama.
Venture capitalists invested $1.12 billion to U.S. mobile companies in last quarter, making it the biggest venture capital financing quarter in history for this sector.
Q3 also had the highest number of mobile deals ever in a quarter, and it was the first time mobile VC deal share eclipsed the healthcare sector, according to a study by CB Insights.
I think few things could be more rewarding than investing in a company that develops a cure or effective treatment for any of the hundreds of conditions that affect millions of people with no effective treatment. But finding the right company can be fraught with risk. That’s one reason why angel and venture investors have been allocating funds to later stage companies that carry less risk.
Luke Timmerman of Xconomy and David Sable, the portfolio manager for the Special Situations Funds, each compiled a handy list of red flags that should make prospective investors in startup life science companies pause. Here are six of them.
Every country, every government, every population is a participant in a global trial and error. Each one faces different circumstances and, therefore, approaches healthcare differently. But, as world health leaders see it, everyone can learn from others’ struggles and successes to improve and simplify their respective strategies. Health information technology is at the core.
Finding the global lessons from local healthcare strategies facilitates progress toward Universal Health Coverage, or UHC, a public health concept championed notably by the World Health Organization and it’s director, Margaret Chan. According to Najeeb Al-Shorbaji, director of knowledge, management, and sharing at the WHO, in a statement released to Healthcare IT News, WHO defines UHC as “all people receiving quality health services that meet their needs without exposing them to financial hardship in paying for them.”
The Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology Beacon Community program, established under the HITECH act, gives grants to local communities to explore health IT innovations. Three Beacon Communities that have been piloting text-message-based diabetes interventions published a paper in the Journal of Medical Internet Research detailing some challenges and best practices for implementing a mobile health intervention.
Voxiva powered all three interventions. Two of the communities, the Crescent City Community in New Orleans, Louisiana and the Southeast Michigan Community in Detroit, used txt4health, a 14-week program aimed at individuals at risk for diabetes. The other, the Utah Beacon Community in Salt Lake City, used Voxiva’s Care4Life platform, a 26-week program for adults already diagnosed with Type 2 diabetes.
Biotechnology startups have stampeded to the public markets this year, but their colleagues in the medical device field have sat quietly on the sidelines.
Chris Ratcliffe/Bloomberg News So far this year, 27 venture-backed biopharmaceutical companies have gone public, compared to just one medical device company, according to industry tracker Dow Jones VentureSource.
BioHealth Innovation (BHI) is a regionally-oriented, private-public partnership functioning as an innovation intermediary focused on commercializing market-relevant biohealth innovations and increasing access to early-stage funding in Maryland.
The information contained in this website and newsletters is for general information purposes only. The information is provided by BioHealth Innovation via its newsletters, but not written or endorsed in any way by BioHealth Innovation unless otherwise noted. While we endeavor to keep the information up to date and correct, we make no representations or warranties of any kind, express or implied, about the completeness, accuracy, reliability, suitability or availability with respect to the website or the information, products, services, or related graphics contained on the website for any purpose. Any reliance you place on such information is therefore strictly at your own risk.
The I2C Conference is a full-day event to help you get your technology moving forward. Come hear three in-depth panels on Innovation, Commercialization and Financing, including speakers from MedImmune Ventures, NASA/Goddard, NIH, Northrop Grumman Information Systems, University of Maryland and many more. Enjoy lunch with your Table Host to discuss issues affecting your innovation or small business with a subject matter expert from a federal lab, university tech transfer office, venture capital, business service organization and others. Tour the wealth of information in our Exhibit area. Apply to pitch your business for feedback at ConnecTech – spaces open for only 6 applicants until October 4th. Register today at the Early Bird rate of $30 to save $10 before the price increases on October 4th!
DreamIt Health Baltimore is a healthtech accelerator that will select up to ten startups from around the world to take up residence in the heart of Charm City and achieve in four months what might otherwise take years. The program is designed to help these teams tackle significant problems in the healthcare industry and achieve critical business milestones. We do this by enabling access to people and resources normally out of reach, by removing as many obstacles as possible, and with guidance from successful entrepreneurs who have been there before and done it before. Participants will have the opportunity to work closely with all corners of Johns Hopkins and tap into the region’s wealth of federal healthcare institutions including CMS, FDA and NIH. The capstone of the program, Demo Day, gives these teams the opportunity to unveil their products and progress before a few hundred early-stage investors and key industry figures.
Christy Wyskiel is the new senior adviser to the president for enterprise development at Johns Hopkins University. Wyskiel has previously worked as an investor in early stage and startup companies. She has also provided business and management support to startups, such as Hopkins spinout GrayBug.
Wyskiel officially takes on her new role leading Hopkins’ tech transfer office Jan. 1. But she’s already busy getting the lay of the land and helping map out what will come next for Hopkins with regard to technology commercialization.
When Pascal Soriot took the reins of AstraZeneca last fall, he said he planned to corral firms with promising innovations in their pipeline to reinvigorate the Anglo-Swedish pharma’s offerings.
And so he has – to the tune of more than $1 billion.
Since the former chief operating officer of Roche AG was named CEO on Oct. 1, 2012, the firm has made five acquisitions, five collaborations with other pharmas to develop drugs, and entered two licensing deals. Six of the 12 moves are tied to cancer treatment developments, a core focus for the firm, while the remaining are in diabetes and renal, kidney, cardiovascular and respiratory diseases.
Governor Martin O’Malley today joined with Montgomery County Executive Isiah Leggett and City of Gaithersburg Mayor Sidney Katz to announce that Emergent BioSolutions is expanding into a new headquarters building in Gaithersburg, and also plans to make improvements to its existing Research and Development site. As part of the expansion, the global pharmaceutical company will retain its existing 235 employees, and hire an additional 133 employees over the next five years.
“Emergent BioSolutions’ continued investment in Maryland helps solidify our position as a life sciences powerhouse,” said Governor O’Malley. “I am proud that Emergent BioSolutions is growing in Maryland, continuing to create jobs and working to develop life-saving vaccines that will give hope to millions of people around the world.”
CareFirst BlueCross BlueShield will offer up to $1.5 million in grants to help medical providers develop telemedicine-based behavioral health services, the Baltimore insurer announced this week.
CareFirst wants to seed projects that use video conferencing or other technologies to allow doctors and others to diagnose and treat patients remotely.
As an African-American man entering a Caucasian-dominated industry, Solomon Graham wasn’t intimidated when he founded Quality Biological in 1983, investing $10,000 of his own money to start the business.
The Gaithersburg company is one of the longest-operating biotechs in Montgomery County and has grown into a multimillion-dollar enterprise. It provides products and supplies for molecular and cell biology laboratories to use in infectious disease and cancer research.
A prominent health system CEO implored the Washington region’s employers to not drop their company health plans in response to the Affordable Care Act, predicting disastrous consequences for the industry if they do.
So far, most companies aren’t taking that step. But enough have to raise the alarm for William “Bill” Robertson, CEO of Gaithersburg-based Adventist HealthCare, which operates two Montgomery County hospitals and network of affiliated services.
“When I was a young entrepreneur, board meetings were by far the worst days of my life,” says Jeff Bonforte, the veteran company-builder who just sold his latest, Xobni, to Yahoo. “Board meetings are the height of insecurity for a CEO. Basically it’s a group of people who can both judge you and fire you based on that judgment.”
He’s had his fair share of bad experiences. At his first company, iDrive, he’d find himself every quarter standing in front of the room, sweating bullets, struggling to get through his meticulously-prepared slides. “It was a mess,” he says. “They’d just sit there and tell me how insufficient I was, how I needed to bring in someone more senior, or smarter. Then it just hit me. I don’t need this. I don’t need people to attack me for four straight hours. I need people who can help me.”
MedImmune’s venture arm has jumped in to lead a $12.5 million round for a Chapel Hill, NC-based startup that is working on a new drug to treat a common ailment spurred by chemotherapy. G1 Therapeutics, which was initially seeded by Hatteras Venture Partners to the tune of $600,000, says that the new funds will finance its IND work and point the company to proof-of-concept data on a drug designed to protect against myelosuppression–the loss of blood cells–during chemo. Hatteras Venture Partners and Mountain Group Capital contributed to the round.
G1 was founded on the work of Norman Sharpless at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill and Kwok-Kin Wong at Harvard Medical School. They concluded that a cyclin-dependent kinase 4/6 inhibitor could play a big role in protecting the bone marrow of chemo patients.
Under Armour Inc. is hunting for the techies that can help the company beef up its fitness tracking device known as Armour39.
Armour39, a digital performance monitor launched in March, tracks an individual’s heart rate, calories burned and workout intensity, and provides a “WILLpower” score that reflects how hard an individual trained during a workout.
QIAGEN N.V. (frankfurt prime standard:QIA) today announced the Empowered Genome Community, which is a first-of-its-kind initiative to help people who have had their genomes sequenced share, explore, and interpret their data with researchers and each other. To highlight how the community can spark new biomedical insight, QIAGEN also released an open collaborative analysis of myopia in 111 people whose genomes were sequenced through Harvard’s Personal Genome Project (PGP), which is a public repository of well-phenotyped human genomes. Anyone – citizen scientist or full-time researcher alike – can directly review and help refine the analysis via QIAGEN’s Ingenuity® Variant Analysis(TM) (https://variants.ingenuity.com/community-myopia) with the goal of jointly publishing robust insights on myopia next year.
Billionaire oilman T. Boone Pickens plans to give Johns Hopkins University $20 million to help spur potentially vision-saving research at the school’s Wilmer Eye Institute.
The gift will be included in the 85-year-old’s estate and will create an endowment to fund a T. Boone Pickens Scholars program supporting scientists.
The Nobel Assembly at the Karolinska Institute announced today that Randy W. Schekman, a Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) investigator at the University of California, Berkeley, Thomas C. Südhof, an HHMI investigator at Stanford University, and James E. Rothman of Yale University are the recipients of the 2013 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for their discoveries of machinery regulating vesicle traffic, a major transport system in our cells.
According to the Nobel Assembly, this year’s Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine honors three scientists who have solved the mystery of how the cell organizes its transport system. Each cell is a factory that produces and exports molecules. For instance, insulin is manufactured and released into the blood and chemical signals called neurotransmitters are sent from one nerve cell to another. These molecules are transported around the cell in small packages called vesicles. The three Nobel Laureates have discovered the molecular principles that govern how this cargo is delivered to the right place at the right time in the cell.
Osiris Therapeutics shares rose Friday morning after the company said it is selling some of its stem cell therapy technology, including its transplant treatment Prochymal, to Mesoblast Ltd. in a deal that could be worth more than $100 million.
Prochymal treats bone marrow transplant cells that attack the recipient’s body, and it is approved in Canada and New Zealand but isn’t being sold. Osiris said it wants to focus on businesses with the greatest commercial potential. Its remaining products include Grafix, which is used to treat chronic and acute wounds, Ovation, which is used in tissue repair, and Cartiform, a treatment for acute cartilage injury.
There have been more than 30 initial public offerings of biotechnology companies so far this year, and there’s a line around the block of promising new entrants looking to debut on the public markets.
Angelika Warmuth/European Pressphoto Agency But don’t call it a bubble. Those in the know are calling it a boom, and saying the good times are likely to continue for biotech, even in the face of clinical setbacks and other bumps in the road.
Cleveland Clinic is in the midst of its annual Cleveland Clinic Medical Innovation Summit today at the new Global Center for Health Innovation. More than 1,100 entrepreneurs, investors, executives and clinicians have gathered for a show and tell of new ideas in the medical world. Cleveland Clinic Chief Information Officer C. Martin Harris talks about how the health system stays nimble on the innovation front.
Cleveland Clinic Innovations, the corporate venturing arm of Cleveland Clinic, was founded in 2000, and it has been hosting the Medical Innovation Summit since 2003. Since Cleveland Clinic Innovations was founded, it has:
There is one certainty about the current regulatory process for drug approval in the United States and Europe: No one likes it.
Manufacturers are frustrated by the need for large, complex, and lengthy clinical-development programs that often hinge on meeting a single endpoint in one pivotal clinical trial. As a result, the cost to bring a drug to market has been estimated to be well over $1 billion — and it may be much higher. Patients and providers are disturbed by lack of timely access to medicines that show early promise in addressing significant unmet needs. Even regulators, who are responsible for enforcing the current structure, chafe at what manufacturers typically present to them: successful trial results in patients who are carefully selected to show the drug offers benefits but who are not very representative of the broader population likely to receive it. Payers then have a mess on their hands: pressure to pay for premium-priced medications that, when broadly employed, don’t offer much therapeutic benefit over existing alternatives.
The research, by Gary Dushnitsky, Associate Professor of Strategy and Entrepreneurship, London Business School and his co-author Dr Alvarez-Garrido, is featured in the British Venture Capital Association’s report ‘The Missing Piece’ and finds that corporate venture capital is now the driving force behind cutting edge medical innovation.
Dr Dushnitsky, also Academic Director, Deloitte Institute for Innovation and Entrepreneurship, said, “Biotech start-ups are increasingly turning to corporate venture capital arms, which are steadily on the rise, while traditional venture capital funds are partially drying out. In a recent Nature Biotechnology study, my co-author and I find that the shift in funding patterns is resulting in an increase in scientific publications as well as patenting output.
Nutty things are happening in biotech. Irrational exuberance has returned. Generalist investors with lots of money are suddenly buying these stocks first and asking questions later. Companies can fire off meaningless press releases, and be rewarded. I heard a big-time money manager talk the other day about a recent biotech IPO being one of the “best performers” in the market. It had a two-week track record, and had done nothing fundamental to earn its tag as a “best performer.”
If markets are driven by cycles of fear and greed, and I believe they are, we are in the greed cycle.
Investors are pouring venture capital dollars into the Washington region at a pace not seen in more than a decade.
Companies across the Washington region have attracted $1.15 billion in the first three quarters of the year, more money than the first three quarters of any year since 2001.
Investments in electronic health records, tools to help hospitals absorb physician practices anda group working with hospital systems to help them set up their own insurance plans. Those three health IT companies helped drive venture capital investment in the software sector, which hit a 12-year high in the third quarter. Medical device and biotechnology companies collectively marked their lowest investment for a nine month period since 2005, according to the MoneyTree Report by PricewaterhouseCoopers and the National Venture Capital Association. It is based on data from Thomson Reuters.
About $3.6 billion was invested in the software sector and there were 42o deals in the quarter.
You can purchase 14 gallons of organic milk or 396 lollipops. You can give her 33 rides on the Ferris wheel at the state fair, or you can get him a couple of violin lessons. You could put the money in a savings account, you could buy her her very own LeapFrog LeapPad Explorer digital learning tablet, or you could buy enough pizzas to feed all of her friends on the block. So many options, so many choices.
I took that money and got my daughter’s genes tested, ordering up an analysis of the composition of her very small self and its odds of living a long and healthy life. And in so doing, I in some small way tied her fate to the success of the company doing the analysis, a genetic-testing startup called 23andMe in Mountain View, California.
AstraZeneca and Taiwan’s National Research Program for Biopharmaceuticals (NRPB) today announced a collaborative program to support academic research proposals using open innovation as a catalyst for drug discovery. The program will connect expert physicians and scientists with a wide range of high-quality, small molecule compounds and biologics developed by AstraZeneca.
Successful research proposals submitted from academic institutes in Taiwan will be funded by the NRPB to explore new therapeutic uses for specific AstraZeneca compounds which may in turn lead to the development of novel therapies for patients. Further financial details were not disclosed. Areas of high interest include cardiovascular, metabolic, respiratory, inflammation, autoimmune, oncology, infection and neuroscience diseases.
Each year, a committee of Cleveland Clinic doctors asks hundreds of their colleagues to weigh in on which emerging healthcare technologies they think will help shape their practice over the next 12 months.
Then, the committee evaluates nominations based on clinical impact, probability of commercial success, progress in commercialization and significant human interest, and produces a top 10 list announced at the end of the Clinic’s annual Medical Innovations Summit.
Biocrossroads, which provides money and support to Indiana’s life sciences industry, announced the seven finalists who stand to gain startup funding in its annual New Venture Competition. Six have biotech or healthcare in their sights. On Oct. 21, five of these companies will compete for $25,000 and access to the Indiana Seed II Fund‘s staff and network for early-stage business support at the Indiana Life Sciences Summit. Second and third place in this competition will rake in $15,000 and $10,000 respectively.
“The New Venture Competition has proven to be a great way for us to find and reward promising companies, and is an excellent opportunity for the competingcompanies to gain some exposure within Indiana’s life sciences community,’ David Johnson, president and CEO of BioCrossroads, said in a release.
StartUp Health, a New York-based incubator for health technology startups, admitted 14 new companies into its three-year development program this week. The program, which received 1,200 applications in the past year, aims to give new medical companies long-term mentoring and access to capital.
The new entrants include companies working on medication adherence, remote medical services and patient engagement in physical therapy. Cohero Health, a one-year-old company based in New York, aims to help kids with chronic asthma manage their condition.
Your liver could be “eating” your brain, new research suggests.
People with extra abdominal fat are three times more likely than lean individuals to develop memory loss and dementia later in life, and now scientists say they may know why.
BioHealth Innovation (BHI) is a regionally-oriented, private-public partnership functioning as an innovation intermediary focused on commercializing market-relevant biohealth innovations and increasing access to early-stage funding in Maryland.
The information contained in this website and newsletters is for general information purposes only. The information is provided by BioHealth Innovation via its newsletters, but not written or endorsed in any way by BioHealth Innovation unless otherwise noted. While we endeavor to keep the information up to date and correct, we make no representations or warranties of any kind, express or implied, about the completeness, accuracy, reliability, suitability or availability with respect to the website or the information, products, services, or related graphics contained on the website for any purpose. Any reliance you place on such information is therefore strictly at your own risk.
When personal genomics and biotech firm 23andMe was founded in Mountain View, Calif., in 2006, the hype over the genetic tests it offered directly to consumers was immediate and irresistible to many. The company promised that for a nominal fee, it could scan your saliva sample and tell you — based on your genetics — everything from who your ancestors were to what diseases you may be at risk of developing many years down the road. 23andMe raised more than $100 million in capital from such big-name investors as Google and Genentech. Today, the company’s website boasts having close to 500,000 “genotyped consumers.”
he Symposium is the Maryland Stem Cell Research Fund premier event that delivers comprehensive scientific talks, poster presentations, Ethics discussions and networking time, enabling cell therapy basic research and technologies from the lab to pre-clinical and to commercialization.
The University of Maryland on Wednesday announced the appointment of Thomas R. Fuerst, Ph.D., as the new director of the Institute for Bioscience and Biotechnology Research.
DreamIt Health Baltimore is a healthtech accelerator that will select up to ten startups from around the world to take up residence in the heart of Charm City and achieve in four months what might otherwise take years. The program is designed to help these teams tackle significant problems in the healthcare industry and achieve critical business milestones. We do this by enabling access to people and resources normally out of reach, by removing as many obstacles as possible, and with guidance from successful entrepreneurs who have been there before and done it before. Participants will have the opportunity to work closely with all corners of Johns Hopkins and tap into the region’s wealth of federal healthcare institutions including CMS, FDA and NIH. The capstone of the program, Demo Day, gives these teams the opportunity to unveil their products and progress before a few hundred early-stage investors and key industry figures.
The Economic Alliance of Greater Baltimore (EAGB) is pleased to announce Wes Moore as the keynote speaker at its Annual Meeting. The event will take place December 11, 2013 at the Hilton Baltimore. Year after year, this celebration attracts the region’s top leaders from industry, higher education and government.
Towson University is getting more serious about entrepreneurship on campus, and Frank Bonsal III will play a big role in that new focus.
Venture capitalists invested $1.12 billion to U.S. mobile companies in last quarter, making it the biggest venture capital financing quarter in history for this sector.
The Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology Beacon Community program, established under the HITECH act, gives grants to local communities to explore health IT innovations. Three Beacon Communities that have been piloting text-message-based diabetes interventions published a paper in the Journal of Medical Internet Research detailing some challenges and best practices for implementing a mobile health intervention.
Wyskiel is the new senior adviser to the president for enterprise development at Johns Hopkins University. Wyskiel has previously worked as an investor in early stage and startup companies. She has also provided business and management support to startups, such as Hopkins spinout GrayBug.
